Jacob Haubert Climate Change - Report 2

In a typical year, humans are pumping over 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. To give you a sense of scale, that’s about 8,500 Pyramids of Giza, or about 150,000 Empire State Buildings.  It started with James Watt, who made some improvements to the coal-powered steam engine.  He hoped that his new engine would make it more efficient, and it became the first modern steam engine.  This helped trigger the industrial revolution.  The industrial revolution caused humans to start using mass amounts of fossil fuels, however people have been using fossil fuels since the romans.  This is because fossil fuels are much more energy dense than the alternatives.  The key was to transform the chemical energy tied up in fossil fuels into mechanical energy that could physically move and power machines.  For example, engines do this by burning fuel to turn chemical energy into heat energy, which boils water to make steam, which is then trapped in a pressurized container.  As that steam is released, it pushes a piston, or turns a turbine, creating movement.  This new technology helped manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation, making them all faster and more efficient, fundamentally reshaping the way we live, work, and play.  The top contributors to climate change are industry or manufacturing, transportation, electricity, heating and cooling, and agriculture.  Post-industrial materials like steel, concrete, and plastic all have to be heavily processed, and we use so much of them that they account for around 30% of global greenhouse emissions annually.  Electricity comes in at 26%, since it contains lights, appliances, industrial machinery, and the internet all rely on a constant flow of electricity.  Next largest is agriculture, making up 21%.  Transportation is 16% and buildings/A/C is 7%.  When you add up emission sources from industries all around the world, it’s not hard to see how we’ve made it to 51 billion tons of greenhouse gasses per year.