This text is dedicated to the importance of the air quality and it is a continuation of the previous post dedicated to the water. Again, I will give a real example from a place where I spend a lot of time, my home town Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Here I have attached few pictures of a journey across the city ...
In the sunny day just before Christmas 2014, me and a friend of mine decided to go to a country-house in the outskirts of Sofia. However, we needed to pass all the way through the city and get out from the other side. During this trip we were witness of a thick smog that has mainly covered the lower part of Sofia, a living place for about a million people! Usually, this picture appears when there is lack of wind (you can see the straight-up smoke of the chimney) and all the smoke from the thousands of vehicles and the few power stations of the city mix together to deliver a toxic breathing cocktail for all the Sofians. Indeed, the quality of the Sofian's air is one of the worst in Europe, see here. This paper is very well written and says a lot about the sources of the air pollution and the health hazards associated with it. Like the water, the air does not have any boarders and the only successful action against its pollution would be a global action. However, everybody should think about the problem and realize that on a personal scale there are not so many choices. All of us around the globe must start using only electric energy for heating and transportation where, this electric energy must be generated from low-carbon sources. Any large scale burning of fossil fuels leads to air and water pollution, high greenhouse emissions, global warming, cancer etc. It is up to us what kind of cities we are going to inhabit in the future, clean or poisonous! We can not say we do not know because the consequences are obvious and scientifically proven. Here I want to show a picture from a talk about the city-environment ...
And here I would like to give a reference to a conversation between a physicist and an economist about the exponential economic growth used as a standard for a wealthy economy during the past decades. Listening to the physician, one can depress himself realising that the humanity is in a gridlock where anything will lead to a burnt planet. Therefore, I would like to repeat the outcome from the work of the master-minds of our civilisation: "The Energy can not be created or destroyed, it converts itself from one form to another". Hence we must convert something without burning into electricity and then to use the electricity for our needs while, during all that process to release the lowest possible heat. Otherwise, with the exponential speed of out progress, sooner or later, we are going to heat the Earth above the limit of body existence. Hence, go electric do it right now or we will continue this suicidal CO2 trend ...
Courtesy NASA
Courtesy NASA