Natural Exploitation

Unlike plants, which approach resource exploitation as a 'dominate or die' principle, humans are less prone to that way of thinking. Natural resources, and most importantly fossil products are highly sought after, and there has been a various research and theoretical frameworks developed to understand exploitation and humans. Some of the theoretical frameworks developed are useful, others merely seek to understand the interactions between humans and resources in a shallow network-y way. But in a climate change paradigm, the interactions are not the most important part. What impact does our exploitation of fossil resources have on the environment?

One of the key impacts of fossil resource exploitation is their greenhouse gas emissions. I won't insult anyone's intelligence by explaining what greenhouse gasses are, which gasses are involved (water vapour is a greenhouse gas also) or the impacts of greenhouse gasses; instead I will allow BBC Bitesize to insult you instead!

The coloured portions of this map identify 86%
of carbon emissions, globally (Source)

An optimistic report produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA), and reflected by a report recently released by BP suggests that global carbon dioxide emissions from energy grew at their slowest rate since 1998. All this occurred whilst global economies grew, indicating a global investment in mitigation solutions against high polluting energy fuels. Of all energy sources, however, oil is still a global leader in production of energy, supplying 32.6% of the world's power.

I will explore the issues around energy production, as well as looking at low polluting methods of energy production and the issues associated with global energy understandings and low pollution energy generation methods. The impact of energy cannot be ignored in modern global environmental change.