How Green Are We, really?
- Ondy Ho
- Apr 15, 2019
- 3 min read
Taiwan aims to increase the ratio of electrical power generated via renewable resources from today’s roughly 3 percent to 20 percent by 2025. This task can only be accomplished through a drastic rethinking of how the country creates, stores and utilizes electricity. -Taiwan Today
Let's take this in for a moment, clean energy, and the use of plastic.
What do you think about when reading "clean energy(or renewable energy)"? You probably think about wind, solar, hydrokinetic and geothermal power as clean while fire and nuclear as bad and dangerous. Well, I did.
Last year we had a joint election with several referendums regarding the environment. Now that I recall it, I feel really silly because a lot of us were against nuclear and fire power or support fire power instead of nuclear out of the idea of saving the environment. Therefore, people were joking about how we make power out of love... The 4 above mentioned power are indeed either causing little or no pollution but there is a huge blindside in terms of application, specifically for Taiwan. Are we merely thinking about the idea of being environmentally friendly with no regard?
What are the pros and cons of wind, solar, hydrokinetic and geothermal power? Is it possible if we go full-clean energy(before the world ends...)?
Here's a video that changed my mind on clean energy and made me interested in the topic:
Yes... Nuclear power is actually considerably clean. Nuclear disasters may not be that horrible either. Of course, I'm not here to say that disasters aren't bad but we might have been misguided. How many lives were lost in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster? How many were actually killed by radiation? One, yes, just one. But 2,202 died because of evacuation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good result but the question here is, are nuclear power plants really that scary? I'll leave it here for your self-research. Discussions are more than welcome.
Plastic: friend or foe?
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) -- McDonald's Taiwan today announced that in response to the Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) planned ban on the use of single-use plastic drinking straws, all restaurants in the country will stop serving plastic straws, with paper ones provided to those with special needs, such as children.
It is good news, of course, to hear that big corporations follow not just a policy but one regarding the environment. However, it gets me thinking, just like nuclear power, about the use of plastic at large. Since there's a growing number of people becoming environmental activists or more aware of saving it, here's a question for you who aren't discussing with us in class, should we work towards banning all plastic products or should we work on making more recycle policies such as reinforcing current ones and making it even easier for people to recycle plastic trash?
What are the products with you that are made(or partially) of plastic? I've got glasses, water bottle, cellphone case, laptop and perhaps others that I don't know. What happens when there's no plastic but we still need those items?
This is certainly a flawed question. I don't believe that plastic should "extinct"; we just have to learn to use it more wisely. Banning single-use "products(not just plastic)" and educating people about the value of things would be a good and long-term goal. Otherwise, by the time we finished solving the war on plastic, the world would still be filled with every other kinds of trash. Hey, I bet banning cigarettes would help just as much as banning straws. What do you think?
Where does all the trash/waste/garbage/disposables go to anyways? Well, there are big towers of incinerators where you burn it and creates air pollution or toxic, landfills where dig and dump until there's no space, or it goes to the ocean killing the environment and the animals around while eventually getting back to kill us. It's truly the cycle of death. I'm referring to The Trash Isles in the Pacific Ocean (click image for intro).
The garbage we produced doesn't just disappear after we put it in the bins. As simple and perhaps stupid as it sounds, this is something we all need to be alerted to. There are people who dedicated their time cleaning up beaches but the endgame is right in our hearts. We could pick up all the trash there is today but the next day the trash would grow right back on the streets if we don't stop littering and producing more.
There will always be junk and the world will gradually be full... but can we slow down the clock or keep hitting the snooze button in hopes of someone else would take the responsibility?
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