Air Pollution

Hey everyone, it’s Julia! Sorry we haven’t posted in a while, Stella and I were away on a school trip to Washington DC and didn’t have time. Moving on, today i’m going to be talking about air pollution and its causes and consequences, then tomorrow we’ll be posting some solutions to the issue. 

Air pollution is created in many different ways. Many of you might think that it’s mainly created from us driving our cars, but the biggest contributor is actually to process to make all of the products we purchase on a daily bases. From the pollution created by all the factories to the transportation in between, it adds up to be a lot. Of course cars contribute a fair amount, but they are nowhere near as bad as some other things according to http://www.cleanerandgreener.org/resources/air-pollution.html . Farming is also top on the list, especially to farming of bovine which we've gone into detail about becoming vegetarian in a older post (which I'll link down below). Keep in mind that all the pesticides need to be included too because they do end up affecting the quality of our air. The last point I'll go over is the production of electricity. The main way our society produces electricity is by using fossil fuels, which causes a lot of air pollution to refine. According to research done http://www.science.smith.edu , United States electricity production is responsible for 62.6% of US sulfur dioxide emissions, 21.1% of US nitrous oxide emissions and 40% of US carbon emissions.

  

So now I'll go over some consequences of air pollution (which won't only be environnemental). So for starters sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide are the cause for acid rain which leads to damaging lakes, forests and soil. These two gases are also very damaging to our health. They lead to urban smog which is responsible for a sickness like Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (which is common with heavy smokers). Lastly, there's carbon dioxide which is of course a greenhouse gas, which leads to climate change. There are countless posts on the blog explaining climate change, so gain I'll link one down below. 

So please make sure to read tomorrow's post which will go over some solutions :-) !

-Julia

Here's a link to the vegetarian post: http://1actaday.blogspot.ca/2017/01/eco-friendly-diet.html 

This is the link to a climate change post: http://1actaday.blogspot.ca/2017/03/climate-changecatching-up.html