The Millenium Development Goals, agreed to by every member country of the United Nations in 2000, call for the worldwide eradication of poverty and hunger, universal education, gender equality and huge improvements in health by 2015: two years ago!!
Can we do this without making the planet warmer?
Let's think big and imagine how we can confront the climate crisis in a way that is realistic about the other major problems that we face as a planet and as a species on it.
Clean Development >
Let's Go SOLAR!
It would be a lie to say that gas emissions weren’t a large part of the increase in global warming. Burning fossil fuels permeates almost all areas of our life. We burn fossil fuels to help produce and transport food, to manufacture goods, to create electricity, and to help start our cars. There’s so many uses for that “golden” oil, but there’s a lot of bad outcomes from overusing it as we are now. To counteract this, solar panels were invented to harness the immense power of the sun. It is an efficient way of creating clean electricity without the increase in pollution. It also saves A LOT of money. The estimated 20-year savings for Americans who switched to solar energy was a little over $20,000. In more crowded states like New York or California, savings were over $30,000. Another attractive feature of solar energy is its reliability. Sunlight is something that is available to every person. No one company or group owns it meaning there’s a surplus amount of peo ple who can access its flow of clean energy with solar panels. Why don’t you talk to your families about switching to solar?
I agree; solar power is very reliable, however, it would be nearly useless to countries with irregular day or sun patterns. There's actually a slight negativity to using solar panels. The installation of solar panels affect the albedo, or surface reflection of the Earth. Solar panels, albeit helpful, have a low albedo to absorb more light rather than reflect it. People argue that this overall increases the temperature of the Earth's surface; however, compared to burning fossil fuels, solar panels have a lower amount of CO2 emissions, consequently making solar energy's pros outweigh its cons.
Resources:
http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewe … 3&hid=4208
Kayla has an interesting point about solar panels and but a country like Germany, which has irregular day or sun patterns, is now generating 50% of its energy from solar. I think the technology has improved considerably and will only get better so we can certainly make a huge positive impact by going solar.
Reference: https://theweek.com/speedreads/451299/g … first-time