The organisation called Ember, which monitors global energy usage, has recently come out with a startling revelation – for the first time in human history, renewable energy sources like wind, water and sunlight are producing more electricity around the world than fossil fuels like coal! This, indeed, is a momentous development, given that by now there is almost universal agreement that the use of fossil fuels is the primary cause behind global warming and climate change. Today, even a kindergarten schoolkid knows that fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, in order to produce electricity, need to be burnt, and while doing so they release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide.
The gases, while eroding the ozone layer that protects our planet from harmful rays of the sun, also form a layer around the Earth, which traps solar heat and warms up our planet. Through centuries, human activity has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, causing the global temperature to rise, thereby raising the possibility of cataclysmic devastation in the none-too-distant future.
The panacea to preventing this is, obviously, limiting the use of fossil fuels, but this has proved to be a tough ask, given the presence of powerful climate change sceptics, who, like US President Donald Trump, think it is a “hoax.”
As witnessed in the umpteen climate summits that have been held in the past decades, there have been heated debates on the need to stop using fossil fuels, with detractors laying the blame for environmental degradation on developing nations like China and India.
They, of course, totally ignore the reality that the “industrial revolution,” which initiated the process of global warming, had begun in the West! The affluent nations of today had enriched themselves even as they destroyed the global environment, and, ironically, are now urging the developing nations to work towards repairing the damage! Enhancing the irony is the fact that, at the moment, while countries like China and India have made phenomenal progress towards curbing the use of fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy, a major polluter like the US has resumed the usage and production of fossil fuels! If, despite this, though coal was still the world’s largest individual source of energy generation till 2024, renewable energy made more electricity than coal overall starting from this year, the credit must go to the developing nations that have shown greater responsibility than the developed ones.
According to the International Energy Agency, the production and consumption of electricity, as more people use lights, computers, air-conditioners, electric vehicles et al, is going up by leaps and bounds, which makes it imperative that humanity continue to opt for renewables while discarding fossils.