2020 might be the turning point for climate actions In 2020, there are some big announcements to have an impact on climate actions. For example, Asian two biggest economies, China […]
In 2020, there are some big announcements to have an impact on climate actions. For example, Asian two biggest economies, China and Japan, announced that each country aims to realize carbon neutrality by 2060 and 2050, respectively. Another example is that we still do not see the official result of the US presidential election 2020 yet (As of December 11th, 2020). However, president-elect Joe Biden mentioned the world biggest economy was planning to rejoin Paris Climate Accord.
In addition to this, many countries and regions set new policies to ban new gasoline engine automotive sales. They are the UK and California. Therefore, if we look back to the year of 2020, we might say that 2020 raises our awareness on climate change.
Before taking a deep dive into climate actions, we have to understand what climate change is first. In our previous article, we can see the definition of climate change by several sources. For example, United Nation defines climate change as follows.
Climate Change is the defining issue of our time. We are at a defining moment. It is from shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding. As a result, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. Without drastic action today, adapting to these impacts in the future will be more difficult and costly.
In personal level, we can actually experience the effect of climate change. For instance, a friend living in Tokyo mentioned to me that temperature in summer was around 30 degree Celsius when he was child (almost 25 years ago). However, he experiences more than 35 degree Celsius several times in a single summer now! Of course, there are a lot of skeptics against climate change. However, it seems that we have to take more drastic actions. Thus, the announcements in many countries and regions could incentives for our actions.
From scientific point of view, mass has energy like the famous equation. “Energy equals to mass times the speed of light squared”. Whether human beings or objects, some energy is necessary for the movement of them. In this sense, as far as living objects exists, we need energy.
The next question is how to produce energy? In the long history, we have developed and made use of water, sunlight, wind, fossil fuels and nuclear to produce energy. However, the emissions of greenhouse gas are big problems through the use of fossil fuels. In addition, there is safety concern against nuclear plants.
Therefore, for safety and sustainability, renewable energy becomes more important and crucial to tackle climate change. Of course, there is no perfect solution around us. This is because renewable energy has some limitations. For instance, if there is no enough sunlight or wind, we cannot take advantage of solar or wind energy respectively. We still understand some restrictions of renewable energy. However, we have to invest in it since climate change is the urgent issue now.
Renewable energy is not the most efficient energy sources. Thus, government supports or investments from big companies can be the first step to make it more prevail. In fact, Apple, which is the most valuable company all over the world, invested in renewable energy in Europe to supply enough energy to its data center. At the same time, investments for the infrastructure is able to create new job opportunities. The IT giant declares that the company aims to be carbon neutral across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle by 2030. We need more role models like Apple in the world.
