EDITORIAL
15 SEPTEMBER 2019
Act now and avert a climate crisis
Nature joins more than 250 media outlets in Covering Climate Now, a unique collaboration to focus attention on the need for urgent action.
………….””One of our articles reveals how countries are progressing towards their obligations under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Sadly, greenhouse-gas emissions continue to climb, even as nations pledge to make substantial reductions. The one glimmer of hope is that energy from renewable sources is now growing faster than that supplied by fossil fuels. However, fossil-fuelled power continues to rise at a rapid rate, and its share of the global energy supply far eclipses that of renewables.””
Carbon free renewable energy that can support baseload electricity supply is geothermal. This is a fact that all of us should accept. We should also accept that solar pv is not a solution to mitigate CO2 emissions. To manufacture solar cell a large quantity of quartz needs to be processed from metallurgical grade to electrical grade. Both the processes are highly energy intensive. By the time solar pv cell emerges it has already emitted sufficient quantity of CO2 to the atmosphere. Solar is not a glimmer of hope to battle carbon dioxide emissions and control global temperature rise. The more one promotes solar pv the more CO2 is emitted. Added to this is the storage batteries. Li or Cd batteries. These two are not a commodities that are freely available in nature that the battery companies can buy. These two elements have to be extracted from minerals and purified to suit battery standards. This process is again energy intensive. This energy has to come from fossil fuels only. The last phase……disposing solar waste. Wake up and think wisely and don’t be under the cloud that solar pv is a clean energy. Now the data is open and available to everyone on this earth. Sit back and calculate the CO2 emissions from the life cycle of solar pv cell. Apparently greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb. A business guy always masks this fact so that his business flourishes. But science is business for scientists. Act now and avert climate crisis.