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The DCV Poverty
Alleviation Program
An Alternative Solution to the Problems of Poverty,
Crime and Global Warming
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Environmental Crisis
 In
the closing decades of the 20th Century, particularly from the 1950s up, there has been a growing awareness of
the environmental damage being caused by air pollution, particularly coming from
the burning of fossil fuels* although this crisis has its origins in the dawn of
the Industrial Revolution. In the agricultural periods, air pollution was not
much of an issue except when there was a big smoky fire (natural or manmade)
that would pose a breathing hazard or at the least, an annoyance to the
neighbors, but there was no lasting environmental damage, as the earth's
then-overwhelmingly many
green living plants would quickly absorb the carbon dioxide content and make fresh air. Also,
wood was generally used for cooking and heating which did
not produce anything near the harmful gases that burning fossil fuels do today and
chemical compounds in wood smoke has even been found to have beneficial antibacterial properties.
*Fossil
fuels refer to the minerals such as coal, oil and natural gas extracted from
deep underground which are from the fossilized remains of once-living organisms
transformed into fuel substances by millions of years of
tremendous heat and pressure in the earth's crust. These are considered
non-renewable resources because it gets consumed by us many times faster than it will take
the earth to make more of these. These do not include nuclear fuels like Uranium
and Deuterium which are of cosmic origins predating the planet itself.
 The use of fossil fuels, starting
with coal began to cause problems as early as the 16th Century in London and
other urban areas with documentation of poor air quality even at that time. By
the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of coal for
furnaces in heating boilers and driving steam engines in factories located
within towns and cities, as well as many homes also using coal for heating and
cooking caused more problems. The smoke from these sources combined with fog
resulted in smog (smoke + fog) which got so bad at times that it stopped transportation
movement in the streets. The blackening effect on buildings was also visible and
worse, death rates attributed to the air pollution was increasing. This led to
moves to legislate clean air as early as 1875.
 As
more fossil fuel became
available for mass consumption, the air pollution likewise got worse. Before
electric services, pipelines from gas companies (the equivalent of present-day
electric companies) in many western cities provided flowing gas for both warmth
and lighting to homes and buildings. As light bulbs replaced gaslights,
the generation of electricity worldwide also included the burning of large
amounts of fossil fuel such as again, coal. Fuel oil or "bunker fuel" replaced many
uses of coal but still produced air pollutants and the use of gasoline and
diesel increased exponentially in the 20th Century with mass-produced
automobiles. Emissions from the
increasing number of motor vehicles even caused buildings to disappear from
view. In this case, the smog is not really from smoke and fog but is actually a
"photochemical smog" which occurs when the chemicals in the emissions react with
sunlight. For many years, gasoline contained the poisonous metal lead (now
almost phased out) which was linked to the rise of lung cancer in urban areas, besides
tobacco use. Aside from serious health problems, other effects linked to air pollution are:
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Acid
Rain - This is caused by the emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur
oxides reacting in the atmosphere to form acids and comes down in the
precipitation which can be detectable as unusually high in acidity. The burning
of coal (such as in coal-fired power plants) is one of the most polluting source
of this
and the oxides can be carried hundreds of kilometers from the source before
being converted to acids and come down with the rain. This contaminates the
freshwater supply, harms vegetation fish, insects, mammals and quite possibly a
threat to human health. Acid rain can also cause damage to manmade structures
over time.
-
Ozone
Depletion / Ozone Hole
- The slow depletion of the earth's ozone layer and the ozone hole
above Antarctica was not really caused by the burning of fossil fuels
but by chlorine-containing source gases such as chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) and related halocarbons long used as aerosols, coolants,
refrigerants and in cleaning electronics which are carried by the
vortex of polar stratospheric clouds in the dark Antarctic winter
months (The Northern Hemisphere's summer) to release the chlorine in
the presence of the sun's ultraviolet light in that region's springtime
to cause ozone destruction. The 1987 Montreal Protocol brought about
the phasing out of much of these chemicals and as a result, the
depletion of the ozone layer was arrested and the ozone hole is slowly
regenerating but it will still take decades for it to return to normal.
Although again, fossil fuels were not the cause of this problem but it
is still a form of air pollution and there are some scientific findings
that the effects of fossil fuel burning may aggravate the ozone
depletion or hinder the regenerative processes.
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Greenhouse gases and Climate Change
- The burning of fossil fuels from all sources have been blamed for the
accumulation of so-called "greenhouse gases". The rays of the sun
normally pass through the atmosphere, interacts with it to maintain
atmospheric dynamics and a portion of this is absorbed by the earth's
surface, the oceans and land masses as well as living things such as
plants, the rest is reflected back out to space. A greenhouse effect
would instead trap the reflected energy rather than allow it to
exit out the earth's atmosphere. Greenhouse gases which include carbon
dioxide, sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxides and other toxic gases from
fossil fuel use are believed to be suspended in the atmosphere which
prevent a significant amount of the reflected solar energy from
returning to space and the resulting trapped heat energy would effect a
global temperature rise of a few degrees. However, that few degrees may
just be enough to alter worldwide weather patterns to cause unusually
powerful storms (typhoons, hurricanes and blizzards), flooding rainfall
and widespread droughts and could possibly melt enough portions of the
polar ice caps to raise worldwide sea levels threatening to drown
coastlines and islands at sea. Besides the environmental damage, this
global warming could endanger certain animal species with extinction
but far worse are the loss of human lives and property from the weather
disasters, food and water shortages (possibly resulting as well in
armed conflicts) and cause a rise of dreaded diseases. Interestingly,
there was a concern in the 1970s to the 1980s that the earth was
actually cooling into a glacial period or a new Ice Age, caused by the
accumulation of atmospheric pollutants that would lessen sunlight
getting through in the first place and even now, there are some
versions (though not generally accepted) of the global warming scenario
which include a possible global cooling period with similarly
catastrophic and destructive effects.
 However, the scientific community
agrees that action can still be taken to effectively reverse the damage caused
by these greenhouse gases which has led to the worldwide effort to find
alternative and innovative ways of generating and using energy including
efficient fuel use to lessen air pollution. In the case of petroleum products,
these are made from oil which is expected to be around for another 40 - 50 years
unless more can be found so we can expect that people will use it until it
finally runs out, or gets so scarce that a few liters will be a huge cost for
middle-income users, or
preferably, when alternative non-fossil fuels are made widely available. Until that
time, oil products will continue to be consumed and generate large volumes of
air pollutants. If even half of that pollution can be lessened, it will be a
major and worthwhile contribution to the global effort.
 
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