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The Onion has been one of the leading publications in our era when it comes to satirical articles. The writers of the organization use near-perfect satire to address the pressing issues of the day we face as a society. Their written wit, while sometimes very exaggerated, is prime for pulling in readers and viewers while exploring very controversial issues that are often overlooked or ignored. This type of satirical commentary is demonstrated superbly in the Onion’s video called “5 Takeaways From the U.N. Report On Global Warming,” where the writers try to remind people just how serious of an environmental issue this is.
The first takeaway that’s shown is that “Narwhals are nearly extinct, so you should act now if you want to hunt one down and make its horn a trophy.” This point mainly hints at just how destructive our society’s practices have been on parts of nature that many don’t even contemplate. The fact that global warming is caused mostly by humans has resulted in multiple species dying off rapidly and that we should expedite the job is precisely what the Onion’s satire is trying to prevent and highlighted by its absurdity.
The next takeaway that is presented in the video is how “Certain nations will be hit much harder than others, so the U.S. still has some time while those go down.” This casual reference to other countries being destroyed is supposed to seem very apathetic. The point of the satire, in this case, is to appear indifferent to the lives of other people when in all reality pointing to the dangerous impact global warming will have on less fortunate countries. It is trying to use the incredibly selfish, callous behavior of the United States to invoke compassion in the viewers to think about those who will be affected before our country.
The third example of where the writers use satire is when they try to put a positive spin on global warming essay for the air conditioning industry, “Nothing but good news for our boys making air conditioners.” The purpose of this is to try to poke fun at the view of continuing down our path of hurting our planet all in the name of capitalism and personal comfort. It is using satire to say that everything will be fine because we will have an industry that will thrive while our planet slowly degrades. This commentary tries to show the audience just how insignificant it is for specific job sectors to succeed while the rest of our world is thrown into turmoil.
The fourth example attempts to show how people are generally unmotivated to try and help our planet in even small ways as when they refer to “32-year-old Michael Hamilton from Lincoln, Nebraska sometimes throws his recycling into the trash can if he’s feeling lazy.” This comment tries to show how lazy we can be as people when it comes to taking even small actions to help our planet. It could take only a couple more steps to use recycling, and that is what the satire is trying to show.
The final point in the video touches upon how slow we are to take action on something this vital and pressing. “All findings from the 2018 report are still true but with more exclamation points now.” This sarcasm tries to point out that we as a country and as a world have known the negative impacts of global warming for decades and certainly over the past year, but yet, we have done very little to fix it. The fact that there are more exclamation points now is trying to hint at the urgency of this matter while mocking our inaction and tendency to disregard these reports.
Overall the Onion leverages satire perfectly in this piece to try and show the need to combat climate change. It uses extremes to try to invoke people’s compassion to save other humans, endangered animals, and this planet. It also points out how ridiculous some of the arguments for not fighting global warming have become. Finally, the article suggests that we, as a society, tend to be very lazy when trying to combat climate change and that nothing has changed since 2018. All in all, these points show that we as humans could be doing much more to help our Earth and the Onion uses wit and satire to show where we should stand on addressing this critical issue.
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