Greenhouse Gas Pollution In The United States

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Background Greenhouse gas pollution threatens the American public's health and welfare greatly. It has multiple negative effects on human health as well as the world climate. Increasing global temperature will rising the death rate and illnesses due to the scarcity of water. Ozone layers will be destroyed which will threaten human’s lives by exposing harmful solar radiation. Moreover, rising sea level and frequent climate change will reduce the number of species and their habitat. And extreme climate will poses threats to some areas in the U.S. that exacerbate local ecosystem and environment, like Alaska. Besides these environment issues, greenhouse gas pollution will adversely impact transportation, agriculture section and forest production…show more content…
Human activities are responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases in the last several decades. As the chart illustrates, the main sources of greenhouse gas pollution are electricity, transportation and industry. The top share of CO2 emission is electricity production, which holds 31% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2013. Most of power plants in the United States produce heat and energy by burning fossil fuels to produce energy to different places. Greenhouse gas emission therefore becomes a side effect of energy production. As many economics believe “climate change is an example of market failure” (Bowen, A., Dietz, S., & Hicks, N, 2012.). Market failure simply means the free market fail to allocate resources efficiently. While producing energy, power plants fail to consider society’s welfare and create “greenhouse-gas externality” by burning fossil fuels. Therefore carbon dioxide emission becomes the adverse external to the power plants industries. The intensity for power plants to produce energy in a cheap and efficient way is over the social benefits they may consider. As a result, excess greenhouse gas leads to market failure in this

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