When you think about solving climate change, what is often your first thought? Is it renewable energy? If you said yes, then you aren’t alone. Many people look to renewable energy as a potential solution for climate change. Today we are going to introduce renewable energy as a solution to climate change, and explore whether or not this really is a solution or just another ploy to shift our energy away from the real issues of climate change. First let's define what exactly renewable energy is.
Renewable energy is “energy from a source that is not depleted when used”.
These are things like wind energy, solar energy, hydroelectric energy, etc. that essentially create energy without a carbon footprint. Right now, the majority of the world utilizes fossil fuels to power our lives. From burning coal and oil, to the gasoline in our cars, we emit an extreme amount of carbon into the atmosphere which has a crippling effect. Gathering these fossil fuels also has an extreme impact on the environment. Oil rigs have to drill deep into the earth’s crust to collect oil and mining operations scrape and dig coal from the earth’s crust, all of which have huge potential impacts on the earth and its atmosphere.
But how do we change that? If the majority of the world relies on these mining and drilling operations for energy, what can we do?
That is where renewable energy comes in. There are many different kinds of renewable energy sources: solar, wind, water, geothermal, bioenergy, nuclear, and hydrogen & fuel cells. These forms of renewable energy are negating the need for fossil fuels and lowering the carbon footprint produced by nations across the world. If this is so, why aren’t we only using renewable energy sources? Why haven’t we gotten rid of fossil fuels completely and begun relying only on this cleaner, “greener”, energy source. The answer is complicated, but it comes down to money and ideation. It costs money to completely shift the energy grid towards renewable energy, and since these technologies are newer, they are more expensive for corporations and big companies to adopt. Another factor that limits renewable energy is the times when it is successful at capturing energy. For example, the sun doesn’t shine 24 hours a day, and in some places they rarely get enough sun for solar to be an option. In other places they may have strong winds, but the winds don’t last for hours or all day. In these places all over the world, individuals wonder how successful renewable energy can really be if it can’t collect energy all day.
These two large limiting factors seem as though they are impassible, and will keep renewable energy from ever becoming dependable. However this isn’t true. They have a very easy and common solution. Ideation changes. These challenges could both be solved by people deciding to work hard to overcome the issue. If corporations don’t want to pay for renewable energy, maybe that ideation should shift. Large corporations pay for lots of things that are very expensive: marketing, merchandise, etc…, why can’t investing in our future be one of them? Furthermore, if the dependability of renewable energy is the worry, then create a network of several different renewable energy options. For example, in Greenville solar could be the main source, but on cloudy days we could rely more on wind or geothermal energy, which could all be buffered by nuclear energy which is accessible as easily as fossil fuel burning.
There are lots of solutions and ways to use renewable energy if people choose to see them. The most important factor of renewable energy is our mindset. If we believe renewable energy isn’t the answer it won’t be. But if we believe it is the answer we will work and change and make it so that renewable energy is the answer to climate change, or at least one of them.
If you are looking for more information about this topic, watch the TedTalk linked below. This is a debate over nuclear energy and renewable energy that really makes you think about the applications of these types of energy.
We hope that you learned a lot in this blog post and that you will come back next week to learn about how we are changing cars to become more green!
- The Edible Landscape Initiative Team
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