Dirty Energy

It’s really agitating to know that humans can be so knowledgeable and so stupid at the same time. There are various ways to generate energy and we obviously choose to stay with the highest-polluting source for many, many years. Coal. It is a nonrenewable resource and emits the largest amount of CO₂ into the atmosphere. But there’s more! Not only are emissions a result from burning the notorious fossil fuel, but also from extracting, refining, and transporting it. Hooray, four processes are adding more unnatural CO₂ to our air…

On page 176, Squarzoni uses a diagram to demonstrate the differences of pollution output between the various energy sources. Coal (obviously) produces a substantial amount of pollution compared to wind energy, solar energy, geothermal energy, nuclear energy and gas. In fact, coal produces more than 2 times the pollution gas does and more than 3 times the pollution nuclear energy does. Geothermal, solar, and wind energy are clean, renewable sources of energy, but play a minor role in our world’s energy supply. I understand that it may not be as easy to produce energy with as coal is, but we can at least try to implement of mixture of these energy sources. We have all these options, but we choose the easy way out.