Climate change solutions.

Climate change is usually represented as a being one of the greatest threats we face and it would be difficult to argue against this. This does not necessarily mean that it is an enormously difficult problem to solve. The greatest driving force in the development of our civilisation has been our ability to harness the energy contained in fossil fuels, starting with the use of coal that enabled the development of the iron and steel industries and the development of our railway systems to transport the materials and products required and produced by our factories during the industrial revolution. This gave way to the use of oil and gas giving us ever more flexibility in the way we used that energy for production and transport. As the demand for those finite resources begins to exceed the supply so we see our energy prices rise. From the climate change perspective we are starting to see that renewable resources such as photo voltaic panels (solar panels), wind power and tidal power become more competitive, indeed many existing established technologies such as combined heat and power plants are at the stage where the consumers whose homes are supplied by these systems are enjoying lower energy bills. What is important is that the use of these alternatives is not diminishing the quality the lives of the people who use them, and as time passes and fossil fuel prices rise the benefits they will bring to the countries and communities who take advantage of them will rise. In this section we will be looking at some of these alternatives and how they are developing.