Acid Rains and Our Planet Environment

We all live on the planet that provides us everything; we do not go anywhere else for anything. We get all we need on Earth. It might sound odd but its true and we take it for granted. In certain cultures, the Earth is called Mother Earth.

We have been around for millions of years and we have been using the resources of our planet for our survival, from the last hundred odd years, we have started exploiting the resources of our planet more actively to make our lives comfortable. We basically use energy resources, but isn’t that all we need to survive? Energy is the key to survival, as humans. We need food for energizing our bodies and we need shelter to save us from the wrath of nature.

However, in the last century we have been using the nature’s resources basically for our development and energy needs. We use coal, water, oil, land, forests and the sea for our energy needs. We also use renewable resources like wind and solar energy.

Moreover, in big dams across the world we recycle water, the three gorges dam being made in china is an example of humans winning over nature, with its 2-mile long wall that stops the river Yangtze, Chinese hope to get around 24000 Mwt of energy from 26 turbines. However, they have moved around a million people from over 600 sq km of area that is going to be submerged once the dam gets operational in 2009.

Projects as big as the Three Gorges dam may have happened only now but for decades, we have been doing great things to show our strength against nature. All this show of strength has only made us exploit nature and we are not habilitating nature the way we are exploiting it.

Climate change along with Acid rain is the reality of our developed world. Climate change occurs due to the excess heat that the industrialized world produces while acid rain occurs due to sulfur and nitrogen based residuals that are produced from industrial processes. When sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are emitted into the atmosphere, they mix with the moisture to form clouds and when it rains, the sulfur and the nitrogen come down as rain.

The reason for acid rain is the increased pollution but primarily the use of coal. Across the world, we use coal widely to produce electricity. The residuals are then emitted into the atmosphere through long and high chimneys that save the low-lying air over the city to carry that pollution. However, the same residual is in the layers above and is blown away to different areas. That is why acid rain usually does not affect the areas where it is produced; at times, it affects areas that are hundreds of kilometers away from the site of the pollution.