Polar Ice Caps

Improved Essays
Most generation's desire to leave a honorable legacy for future children. In the case of humanity, not only does a generation leave behind its culture, but also the state of the Earth. Over the past 50 years, there has been a significant increase in the consumption of natural resources. In addition to the depletion of fossil fuels and natural gas, this increased consumption is damaging the planet; the increased carbon dioxide levels has caused the destruction of the ozone layer, and its level of protection to the surface of Earth. More of the sun’s dangerous rays reach the ground, which most noticeably has resulted in the melting of the polar ice caps. This is just one example of the growing problems caused by people taking the health of the …show more content…
The first step requires the stopping of pollution, which means everything associated with natural gas usage in cars, power plants, and oil powered house heaters. Unfortunately, this is not a very practical solution that people would accept and implement. Luckily, clean energy sources exist such as solar panels, windmills, hydro, geothermal, and wave energy. All of those are used today, but none of them are used to their full extent. The resource used most and creates massive amounts of energy is hydropower. The hoover dam creates about 4 billion kilowatt hours and supplies 1.3 million people with clean renewable energy. There are only so many rivers in the world and most already have a dam built there, but just in the U.S. only ten percent of the dams that already exist produce power, leaving ninety percent or 80,000 dams that do not make energy (Spector). Also, out of the dams that currently produce energy, not all of them are used to their full potential, running off of old technology that is not as efficient compared to modern dams. Hydropower requires a larger river and a dam to produce energy, but solar energy can be collected and used by anyone. It is very simple to get solar panels installed on roofs of houses. This would cut down the necessity to rely fossil fuel energy as much, which would reduce

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