Industrial Revolution: The Use Of Fossil Fuels

Due to the use of fossil fuels an increasingly large output of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the earth is slowly but surely getting warmer. The problem with this is that ice is melting, making the sea level rise, and something called “Global Weirding” is taking place, changing global weather patterns and creating storms in places where they are otherwise unheard of, and ecosystem are changing, driving some species to go extinct. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the global economic system has relied mostly on coal and other limited and polluting resources as their primary source of energy. While it may be said that without the use of such resources we would not be at the technological standing we are today, they have

Take a look at recycling; the plastic coffee cup you used this morning can only be recycled so many times before it ends up as part of a plastic bench made from recycled material sitting in a park or a supposedly “eco friendly” trash can, an item that can no longer be recycled; and just think about all the fuel and energy it took to get it there. Another way to look at these problems is from a scientific point of view; based on past evidence and our current rising heat levels, the average temperature of the earth 7 generation from now will have risen 24.5 degrees due to use of fossil fuels and the effects of climate

Our current cycle consists of five major portions: first is extraction; extracting the resources that we need from the earth, leaving no way for the resources to replenish or regrow, while also driving people and animals out of their native home. Second is production, where the resources we have pulled from the earth are being make into products, in the process releasing polluting chemicals into the air, while ruining the health of the workers that take part in the production, people that are often the same ones driven from their home by the extraction of resources from their land. Third is distribution, where all the products are put into corporate businesses that sell them as fast as they can at half the price it actually took to make them. Fourth is consumption: here we see people buying the items put into production, only to throw four fifths of the items away within the month. The fifth and perhaps most devastating is disposal, where the product that took so much to produce are thrown in the trash, soon to become part of a landfill, or get thrown into an incinerator to pollute our atmosphere. While these are all parts of our everyday lives, there are alternate options for every section of this cycle: rather than extracting resources from the land in a way that leaves them with no way to replenish themselves, we can only take what we need, leaving the rest to regrow. Rather then