Walden Air & Water Pollution Are Great Concerns and Need to Be Addressed Responses

EnviroScDiscWk1ClarkA

Two environmental issues that are important to me are greenhouse gas emissions reduction and air quality. Having lived for about a decade in a climate of weeks of 100 plus temperatures and months of daily health warnings for air quality. Energy and food consumption is the driver for these particular issues. Our reliance on fossil fuel and meat-based diets in particular. The “norms” in America. So interwoven are the economic and cultural aspects, it is difficult to unwind it all, but an overwhelming majority of scientists agree the world is warming, let’s use one of the sources and start there. The atmosphere is ephemeral by nature and the harm done to her can be healed relatively quickly, “Mediterranean-type climates face immediate drops in rainfall when greenhouse gases rise, but this could be interrupted quickly if emissions are cut. This is the finding of new research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which adds to the list of known benefits of rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions to keep global heating below 1.5°C.” (Imperial College London, 2020) This should be factored into the efficacy of any energy source, the effect on that number 1.5C as well as sustainability, renewable energy, and electric cars offer the best options here.

What we put into our homes and cars to make them go is causing the world to get hotter. What many of us are putting in our bodies to make them go is having the same effect on our planet. “The consequences of land-use change stemming from expanding agricultural production were the focus of a paper published Wednesday by the World Resources Institute. It showed that reducing heavy red meat consumption — primarily beef and lamb — would lead to a per capita food and land use-related greenhouse gas emissions reduction of between 15 and 35 percent by 2050. Going vegetarian could reduce those per capita emissions by half. Livestock production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. A second paper, published Tuesday in Nature Communications analyzed about 500 different food consumption and production scenarios worldwide and found that nearly 300 of them could feed the global population without cutting down more forests. The biggest contributing factor to food-related deforestation is eating meat, the study says. “Both (papers) highlight that dietary changes are very, very important — one for climate change impacts through greenhouse gas emissions, and the other purely through agricultural expansion,” said Oxford University Future of Food Program researcher Marco Springmann, who is unaffiliated with the studies.” (Magill, 2016) Paradigm shifting behavior is needed globally but unfortunately human attitudes toward meat and fossil fuels fun along the same weary paths of tradition. We are trending with each toward increased costs due to availability. Governments could encourage green diets by taxing some forms of meat as they do cars in terms of environmental impact.

References,

Imperial College London. (2020, February 17). Mediterranean rainfall is immediately affected by greenhouse gas changes. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 1, 2020, from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200217162351.htm

Magill B. (2016, April 20). Studies Show Link Between Red Meat and Climate Change. Retrieved December 02, 2020, from https://www.climatecentral.org/news/studies-link-red-meat-and-climate-change