Record heat, tornados, flooding, hurricanes, forest fires, and drought – we know that burning fossil fuels is cause damage to our planet. Human-created climate change is rapidly destroying our environment and disrupting our daily lives with more frequent and more violent weather events.
When thinking about ways to reduce our individual contribution to climate change it is important to understand the overall usage of fossil fuels. Our transportation, heating our homes, cooking, using electricity, and products we buy, all of these factors contribute to our lifetime of fossil fuel usage.
The best way to tackle the issue of individual fossil fuel usage is to not focus on one area. One could say, I don’t drive that much or my electric bill isn’t that high, while heating their home with fossil fuels. Or think, gee my electric bill went up after I bought an electric car or heat pump rather than considering how fossil fuel combustion was lessened.
Add solar panels to the roof and you are now creating your own electricity without burning fossil fuels, greatly reducing your lifetime contribution to climate change.
This is why there is a movement towards electrification. If heat, transportation, cooking etc are all electrified, fossil fuel burning is lessened. This moves the burning of fossil fuels to the power plants where 1. it can be managed more efficiently and 2. can be lessened over time with the addition of more alternative energy sources such as wind and solar. Just look at Spain, Denmark and Lithuania – countries that get most of their electricity from wind.
Alternative energy is possible and if one has electrified their home by removing fossil fuel consumption in the home by adding heat pumps, electric appliances rather than gas appliances and driving an eclectic vehicle, one’s fossil fuel consumption is greatly reduced.