Category: Element

Biofuel

Ombeni Urio is a biofuel entrepreneur in Arusha, Tanzania. He runs a company which installs biogas systems. The systems consist of tanks into which animal or human waste is flushed, which then produces natural gas as it decomposes. The gas is then piped off and used for cooking fuel, and the residue waste becomes fertilizer for crops. Photo: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development (CC BY 2.0)

Biofuel is fuel made from organic material, normally plants in some form. Common biofuels are wood, ethanol and biogas. As the carbon in biofuels are part of the natural carbon cycle, the carbon dioxide emitted when biofuels are used doesn’t increase the greenhouse effect and global warming. Biofuels can however be problematic if farmland or …

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Fossil fuel

How can we move away from fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic climate change? Source: The Current Sea

Examples of fossil fuels are petrol, diesel, oil and coal. They are called fossil fuels as they were created over hundreds of thousands of year from old organic material. Dead parts of plants and small animals at the bottom of the sea and in the ground were slowly turned into the fuels that we are …

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Greenhouse gases

Night-Shining Clouds might be getting brighter due to higher levels of greenhouse gases. Source: NASA and Jan Erik Paulsen

Greenhouse gases exist in the earth’s atmosphere and help making the earth habitable to humans, by keeping some of the heat from the sun trapped at the earths surface. This is called the greenhouse effect. When more greenhouse gasses are added to the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect increases. This leads to global warming and climate …

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