Since the beginning of the 21st century, former presidential candidate and vice president Al Gore travelled the world raising awareness about the effects of global warming. In 2006, his world famous movie “An Inconvenient Truth” hit the movie theatres and people from all over the world flocked to the movie theatres to watchthis movie. It showed how the polar ice cap is melting away and demonstrated very real evidence of what will happen if the ice cap disappears completely. Al Gore’s documentary explains that one of the results of the melted polar ice cap is that all of the freshwater willrun into the sea and slow the Gulf Stream down. The worst-case scenario is that the Gulf Stream will eventually stop flowing. The effects on the northern European climate will be catastrophic as the Gulf Stream is responsible for the summers in northern Europe, and without it there is a very real possibility that the warm summer weather will disappear.
Reducing our carbon footprint
As the years progress, we are seeing greater and greater repercussions of the way that we have been treating mother earth. Fortunately there are ways of reducing the damage and turning the way the world is headed around. One crucial part of this is to reduce our carbon footprint.
This is the explanation of a carbon footprint from Wikipedia:
A carbon footprint is historically defined as “the total sets of greenhouse gas emissions caused by an organization, event, product or individual.”
There are those that are already trying to reduce their carbon footprint on the world. As reported in this article in Newsblaze, the global investment company TRADE24 is starting to invest in Virtual Reality glasses that will allow their employees to conduct intercontinental meetings without having to travel. This will reduce the cost of airfares, and not only save the company tens of thousands of dollars each year, but also reduce the damage to the environment that the frequent airtravel by company employees is causing.
If more and more companies would start following TRADE24’s initiative then slowly but surely we will see these effects starting to spill over into other areas and our world will start feeling better.
Increasingly sustainability and green technologies are getting prominence in urban governance and with the emergence of smart cities across the globe, as the next frontier of human settlements.
The global nature initiative
We are starting to see more and more investments and inventions being made in order to safeguard our planet,thus making sure that we will have a healthy home for generations to come. The nations of the world have now come together to try and reduce our negative impact on the world.During the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris,representative from each country reached an agreement on how to reduce our carbon emissions with the stated aim of reducing our footprint onthe earth.This conference reached groundbreaking results in the discussions and is the first major consensus between the countries since the 1992 Kyoto Protocol.
In addition to the world’s governments stepping up to the plate to ensure that we will have a green home, there are also a number of private actors playing an important part in the reduction of carbon emissions. Elon Musk, for example,is investing in the development of a fully electric car. This car is known as the Tesla car and is the first of its kind with the longest range compared to the other electric cars that we have seen so far. With the era of the electrical bike, emissions in large cities seem to be decreasing exponentially as commuters opt to leave their car at home, and take their bikes instead.