Question: have you come close to finding a solution to global warming and a alternitive to fossil fuels?

Kevin Motherway answered on 11 Nov 2014:

Not me personally. But there’s a whole section in the EPA that focusses on Climate Change and trying to manage our Greenhouse Gas Emissions. An issue that I am personally involved in is a landfill that I am managing: Landfills can give off a lots of Methane and we deliberately burn it in a special flare and convert it to CO2.

That might seem a crazy thing to do, but Methane is actually 26 times more potent as a Green House Gas compared to CO2, so methane emissions are actually really important to manage, by safely flaring it off and converting it to a less harmful Green House Gas. In Ireland one of our biggest emission is Metane from belching Cows!

But you’re right, finding alternatives to fossil fuels is really important. If we can crack generating clean electricity from renewables like wind and wave energy we can use the electricity to fuel cars, heating in homes etc. The problem is it’s still so much cheaper to use fossil fuels (especially coal) so the world is not so keen on renewables as yet.