Erica Plante
Mme Chartrand
EAE3U1-02
March 3rd 2009
The recession: an unlikely solution to our environmental problems
There are two major problems that we Canadians and Americans need to deal with; the recession and our environment. Firstly, we have borrowed an enormous amount of money, then gave it to people that could not pay it back. This created a huge dept for our country (www.macleans.ca). While the debt continuously increased over a long period of time, this is where it became a recession. Furthermore, the environment is what surrounds us with beauty and grace. Yet we continue to be careless by throwing garbage in the wrong places, use un-renewable sources and destroy forests for merchandise. These two aspects of our lives are going to get a lot worse. However, who would have thought putting the two together could be a good thing? The current recession is beneficial to our environment because when we try to save money, we conserve more energy, purchase less useless, wasteful technologies and find new, more efficient ways of transportation.
First of all, the amount of energy we use in our homes creates an enormous amount of pollution. However, we mainly waste this energy by being careless, forgetful and unimaginative with our ways of living. During this recession, people will realize that there are many simple ways of saving energy and the environment, while saving money. An important example of wasteful energy is when we leave the lights on when no one is in the room. It is easy to think about turning the lights off, however there is also a new, more efficient light bulb that we have been able to create. A Conventional light bulb only uses 8% of its energy to produce light, and the rest is heat (www.davidsuzuki.org). When the lights are left on and they heat up the house, this is when people use more energy to bring the temperature to their likings. This makes the coal burning generators work harder, thus producing more energy, creating...