(TheConservativeTimes.org) – The United States has been able to slash its emissions and improve air quality by increasing the use of renewable energy which has also yielded hundreds of billions of dollars.
The study was published in the Cell Reports Sustainability; it was based on data that’s available publicly, and it focuses on the uptick of renewable energy from 2019 to 2022.
Dev Millstein, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said, “From 2019 through 2022, wind and solar generation increased by about 55%. By 2022, wind and solar provided roughly 14% of total electricity needs for the US.”
By reducing the use of fossil fuel power plants and using wind and solar power, the nation has cut its carbon dioxide emissions by nine hundred metric tons. The researchers found that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide both decreased by 1m metric tons over the three-year period that they tested. Authors wanted to determine the impact of that reduction so they “used air quality models to track the population exposed to pollution from power plants,” according to Millstein.
They launched epidemiological research to look into the effect of those emissions and their benefits by using the Environmental Protection Agency dollar value to establish the value of reducing the risk to the population.
While looking into this, they found that the reductions of both sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide provided almost two hundred and fifty billion dollars worth of climate and health benefits to the United States. The study looked into the benefits of wind and solar to certain regions of the United States. They found that some places benefitted more with wind power and some better with solar power.
“These findings can help us target future wind and solar development to provide the greatest climate and health benefits,” said Johnson, a North Carolina State University climate and energy professor whose work is cited in the study.
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