Staying healthy has never been more important, as the need to stay healthy can significantly impact almost every part of your life. Thankfully, you can do many things to stay healthy, such as eating a balanced diet, exercising regularly, and taking time to rest and relax.
However, while all of this sounds great, there’s one thing affecting our health that we can’t change unless we all work together: climate change. Thankfully, scientists believe we can slow climate change and improve our health by switching to more renewable energy sources. To find out all about this and why renewable energy is so essential for our health, keep reading below:
What is Renewable Energy?
Renewable energy is energy that is derived from natural resources. These resources can be replenished much faster than they can be consumed. Some examples of renewable energy include sunlight and wind. On the other hand, fossil fuels are non-renewable resources. These energy sources take hundreds of millions of years to produce and create harmful gases when they are burnt, such as carbon dioxide.
Why is Renewable Energy So Important?
Energy is at the heart of the climate challenge and is crucial to the solution. Almost 75% of the greenhouse gases surrounding the earth and trapping heat from the sun are generated through energy production by using fossil fuels to create heat and electricity. This is an astounding figure which needs to be reduced quickly. Many scientists argue that we need to reduce emissions by almost half by 2030 to avoid climate change’s worst impacts.
However, this is going to be hard to achieve. To meet our target, we must end our reliance on fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind. These energy sources are not only good for the environment; they have many other benefits.
The Main Benefits of Using Renewable Energy
Here are some of the main benefits of using renewable energy:
- It’s better for the environment – as mentioned above, we must act quickly to slow climate change. One way we can do this is by using renewable energy sources.
- Improve public health – you might not realize it, but using renewable energy can improve your health. We’ll talk about this one in more detail below.
- Constant replenishment of supplies – if you listen to the news, there’s a good chance you’ve heard that there is a lack of fossil fuels in the world. Many offshore oil and gas sites are being decommissioned with help from a concrete coring company. While this might not sound like exciting or interesting news, it could significantly affect you in the future. If we no longer have access to fossil fuels, we will no longer be able to live as we do now. Thankfully, renewable energy can help. This type of energy can be constantly replenished.
- Economic benefits – unlike fossil fuel technologies that are mechanized and capital intensive, renewable energy is not. While the setup costs of renewable energy aren’t necessarily cheap, once the infrastructure is in place, it takes little money to maintain. As well as this, renewable energy is much cheaper to purchase than gas or electricity.
- Reliability – solar and wind farms are much less likely to suffer from large-scale failure.
The Health Benefits of Using Renewable Energy
We mentioned above that using renewable energy can be good for your health, and it can. The main health benefit of using renewable energy is that our atmosphere and the air we breathe would no longer be polluted by as many greenhouse gases and other fuels that are emitted by fossil fuels. According to a recent study, the total economic impact linked with health impacts caused by fossil fuels is almost $900,000 billion. This is equivalent to 6% of the GDP in the US.
However, it’s not just air pollution that would reduce. The water we drink would also benefit from the change to renewable resources. This is because renewable energy, such as solar and wind, requires no water to operate. Reducing water use and pollution would make more water resources available for drinking water and economic sectors like agriculture.
Scientists and doctors have discovered that some common diseases linked to water and air pollution include cancer and breathing problems such as asthma.
As you can see, there are many benefits to using renewable energy, not just benefits to our health but also to the economy and the planet. While this may be true, reducing fossil fuel use isn’t as easy as it sounds. The price of changing to renewable sources is currently too high for people to take the leap. Let’s hope this changes in the future, so we can meet our target of reducing our fossil fuel use by half.
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