What really stood out to me in the past couple of weeks has been my personal impact in releasing pollutants into the atmosphere. I do not consider myself a wasteful person, but my calculated carbon footprint was over 10 times what was considered sustainable. It is crazy to think that an eight hour airplane flight in itself would qualify a person as “not sustainable.” When looking at this issue, I believe it best to be honest. The use of airplanes, cars, heating systems, and other energy intensive systems will not stop in the near future. As the world keeps expanding, more and more people will use carbon emitting devices. The only solution I can see is to engineer our way out of this mess.
Alternative forms of energy such as wind or solar could have a big impact on carbon emissions if perfected. Currently, one of the biggest struggles for clean energy is how to store it. Modern day batteries do not have the capacity for large-scale, long term energy storage. If we could surpass this hurdle, a journey towards carbon neutrality would be much more plausible. Infrastructure upgrades such as expanded highways, more efficient public transit, or even new ideas such as Elon Musk’s Hyperloop could be very effective.
Smarter packaging with less waste coupled with better, easier to use recycling systems could also help create less waste. Also, imagine if new houses were all built with Tesla’s solar panels!
Heating and electricity costs would be lower for the owners of the house, and less carbon would be admitted. In general, we need to create energy efficient products that have a monentary incentive over former products for them to be successful. If we could do that, an adaption to green energy would be much faster.
Image and Topic Sources
“http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/132405-what-is-elon-musk-s-hyperloop-the-700mph-subsonic-train-explained”
“https://www.tesla.com/solarroof”