Why Going Green May Not Always Be Good

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Going green has a depicted itself as being a cure for the planet, and the answer to all environment problems. To my surprise at the time bring it is not. So why is going green not always be a good thing? To answer this question I looked into several areas; how energy is generated today and its impacts, the costs to companies for going green and the personal impacts to me for going Green. I also attempted to look at three specific properties: 1. Does it reduce our energy need compared to current technologies, 2. it can be no worse for the environment and 3. Is it economically practical. Energy used by Americans today is predominantly generated by power plants. Most power plants burn fuel, coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, which creates steam to drive a turbine that generates electricity. Sometimes nuclear or solar energy creates the steam to drive the turbine. Other technologies, such as solar photovoltaics or fuel cells, rely upon chemical reactions to generate electricity. For this paper I will be concentrating on the fuel source that generates the majority of our electricity, coal. Coal like most of our current energy fuels is finite, it cannot be replenished once it is burned and cannot be considered a renewable resource. Most people do not know that coal is just decomposed plant and animal matter that over millions of years is gradually transformed into hard black solids by the sheer weight of the earth. Coal is typically burned to create steam, which is then piped at high pressure over a turbine, causing it to rotate, producing electricity. So what does coal have to do with going Green? Coal produces over 57% of the electricity generated in the United States. The same energy needed to fuel electric or ”zero-emission cars”. Electric cars are arguably dirtier than gasoline powered cars. So in the end we should be comparing the impacts on people and the
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