preview

Sustainable Opportunities For Reducing Carbon Emissions And Climate Change Essay

Better Essays

The first decade of the 21st century has generated unprecedented levels of environmental awareness and activity around the globe. Front-page headlines increasingly warn of a planet at the brink of calamity, with ever-increasing rates of industrialization and consumerism that are rapidly depleting the world 's supply of natural resources and threatening to permanently alter the earth 's climate. At the box office in 2006, Al Gore 's An Inconvenient Truth eclipsed summer blockbusters and became a revolutionary documentary. The shocking images of melting ice caps, devastating natural disasters, droughts, oppressive heat waves, disease and famine, and all of the direct or indirect perils of unchecked human industry and greenhouse gas emissions captured the nation 's attention and propelled global warming into everyday vocabulary (Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth). This popular awareness and urgency is spurring change in every corner of society as governments, organizations, and individuals reexamine their impacts on the environment and adopt sustainable or "green" measures to reduce those impacts. Every aspect of life must be reexamined to determine sustainable opportunities for reducing carbon emissions and climate change through conservation practices and alternative technologies, such as biofuels.
Although the collective focus on sustainability in the past has been championed by environmentalists and concerned citizens acting on civic imperatives, the economic reality of

Get Access