The impact of Climate Change
For the final article in this blog, I’m going to be discussing climate change and the negative impacts that we are currently seeing it have on our planet. I will also discuss what measures are being taken to reverse it. Climate change ties directly into clean energy as the reason we are working so hard to further it is to reverse climate change’s effects. The article I will be discussing is titled, Toward global sustainability: Education on environmentally clean energy technologies. It comes from the journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.
We are reaching a critical point where the damage caused by climate change may become irreversible. Extreme measures soon need to be taken to prevent disasters such as a shortage of non-contaminated drinking water for future generations and a lack of clean air. The article says, “According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, exposure to air pollution leads to increasing cardiopulmonary mortality due to lung cancer [13], [14], [15].” (Nowotny, 2018) This will only increase if we continue our use of fossil fuels. This is especially damning taking into consideration we are living in a pandemic where many people’s immune systems are compromised, especially their respiratory systems.
With the nearing of this critical point, there has been an increased awareness of the dangers of climate change.
With this increased awareness, we have seen the development of more low carbon footprint buildings, photovoltaic/solar farms, and hydrogen-fueled cars, buses, and other public transport most recently. The article cites the following statistic from Bloomberg New Energy Finance for reference:
“According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, global investments in clean energy technologies have grown more than 5-fold from $62 B in 2004 to $329 B in 2015. In fact, deployment of solar- and wind-based power sources has seen dramatic expansion in the last decade, and constituted 3.2% of the total electricity generated around the world, and 4.2% in the U.S.A.” (Nowotny, 2018)
While the increased use of solar and wind energy is always welcome, there is also a need to use more hydrogen energy as well. Growing more into a hydrogen based economy would be a very efficient way to combat climate change.
Hydrogen energy is a zero carbon fuel that is burned with oxygen. It is used in fuel cars and internal combustion engines so if we were to eventually transition to this serving as the primary way to power vehicles then it could have a significantly beneficial impact in our atmosphere. It does however require significant time and investment with the development of new technologies and industries as well as education on the matter.
Nowotny, J. (2018) Towards global sustainability, Renewable and sustainable energy reviews, Volume 81, Part 2.
https://www-sciencedirect-com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/science/article/pii/S1364032117309929
