Читать книгу Energy - Группа авторов - Страница 25

We face a terrible global energy crisis, triggered by continued growth in the world’s population, continued reliance on fossil fuels, and increased demand for energy for various purposes. It is well understood that unless the rise in greenhouse gas emissions is prevented or reduced, there will be major turbulence in the global atmosphere, with detrimental effects on human civilization and the economy. Such a stubborn problem needs to be addressed by facilitating cooperation between policymakers and designers in different fields of science, engineering and technology.

Healthy creation, evolution and use of technology require major steps in the direction of progress. Therefore, to achieve goals of the optimum scale and magnitude within a limited timeframe, policymakers need to be technologically adept, and aware of policymakers’ deeper social and political problems. Similarly, it is also necessary for policymakers to unite with the academic community to achieve technical objectives. The hour’s need is to bring these two main groups together closely, with a primary focus on educating socially relevant and competent engineers and technologists to take care of the decades and centuries ahead.

Policies have been adapted to fossil fuels in the previous era and have earned ample preferential treatment, while renewable resources, on the other hand, are an aspect of choice. In economists’ opinion, market tax pricing of carbon would allow for more efficient choices between competing technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Burtraw 2008; Parry and Williams 2013).

The global community is now committed to a consensus on reducing the unhealthful increase in Earth’s temperature to 2 °C and to initiate improvements to achieve this goal. This would make it possible for the planet to abolish the burning of fossil fuels in order to achieve an effective zero‐carbon emission status. Therefore, the need for the hour is for a radical change in the lives of modern humans on the crusade towards a brighter future.