Photo Credit: Karl Gerber, Hürth, NRW, Germany.
The world around us is rapidly changing. As the percentage of land under pressure from industrial, agricultural and other anthropogenic activities expands, the climate crisis has worsened.
The number of natural disasters recorded by the media has been increasing each year. Extreme climatic events have become more frequent and intense, throwing various ecosystems and their inhabitants into a state of disarray.
The Earth is warming from the sum total of human impacts on the environment. Its effects are far-reaching and have intensified over the decades. The planet’s water resources, in its various forms, have changed. The poles have begun to shrink, while fires spring up in an arctic landscape with lessening snow cover. The world’s oceans are simultaneously rising, threatening to wipe out entire coastal and island habitats – monsoon cycles become increasingly erratic, drought simultaneously parches vast tracts of land while intense spells of torrential rain flood others. The myriad expressions of the climate crisis contribute to billions worth of damage in the form of lost lives, destroyed property, resource shortages, etc. Thousands of species could be lost within the coming century, and we risk the planet becoming unsuitable for habitation.
As countries worldwide scramble for the much-needed solution, the term ‘green tech’ has increasingly entered common parlance. It refers to technologies that can sustain human requirements while exerting a minimal—or no—impact on the natural world. The focus of green tech majorly concerns societies’ energy needs: fossil fuels have been identified as the leading drivers of the climate crisis. It is estimated that the average person’s lifetime consumption of fossil fuels may range between 120 and 700 tonnes (every tonne of fossil fuels puts around 3-6 tonnes of greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere. Now multiply that by approximately 8 billion people).
It is clear that the use of fossil fuels must be immediately curbed and replaced with renewable sources of clean and green energy, such as solar and wind power, hydroelectricity, and hydrogen fuel (Clean energies are those which produce little to no greenhouse gasses as byproducts, while green energy is made with renewable sources of power such as sunlight or wind. Black or grey energy, on the other hand, is neither renewable nor environmentally friendly).
These efforts to future-proof our energy matrix hold great promise, with predictions that widespread implementation of green technologies can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% before 2050 and bring about a net zero carbon-neutral planet by 2070. Tapping into inexhaustible sources of power like wind, sunlight, atmospheric hydrogen, etc., provide a suitable opportunity for nations to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
The increased entry of AI into the sustainability space opens up multiple avenues for controlling an institution’s or entity’s environmental footprints at a time when it is imperative to maintain the health of the whole (the planet) to ensure the health of its parts (the environment and all its inhabitants).
However, recent studies have revealed that the promise of green technology comes with challenges, particularly in the development and implementation stages. As the demand for electricity to replace all other sources of fuel increases, so does the pressure on the resources used to produce it. While ‘green energy’ may be considered to be non-polluting due to the nature of its feedstocks, the process and infrastructure required to make it still present a significant drain on natural resources. Manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, electrolysis machines, and many other devices needed to generate green energy still requires large-scale mining of mineral resources, scarce Earth elements that play a crucial role in producing electrical technology.
As supplies of these elements are scarce and limited to specific nations, their production can result in resource monopolies and pose significant threats to human rights – especially when mining companies attempt to keep costs low by cutting down on worker protection measures. Producing one tonne of Rare Earth Elements may also result in the release of over 2000 tonnes of toxic waste from various stages of the processing cycle.
It is estimated that the mass greening of technologies will create a 600% increase in demand for rare earth elements and over 4000% for batteries. The implications of this have yet to be fully considered when attempting to face the significant looming climate change crisis.
Like many other aspects of the climate crisis, the question also arises of whether economics will determine access to and thus the benefits of the greening process for more well-off players while dumping the externalities on the less well-off.
While certain nations have seen success in using hybrid fuels—a mixture of green and fossil fuels combined to reduce overall emissions—the problem of the climate crisis and its exacerbation by ‘gray’ and ‘black’ tech must be solved in the coming decades if we are to move away from the ‘age of fossil fuels’ and secure a liveable future on our planet.
