The Pacific Times | The Only Student-Run News Website in Natomas

Student Voices: Energy Causes Air Pollution

By Kuljit Kaur
Staff Writer | The Pacific Times

Energy is slowly destroying the Earth and its air quality. Np3 senior Lovleen Kaur has dedicated her Senior Project towards addressing the issue of air pollution and how energy production and consumption contributes to the air pollution problem.  

“When trying to create energy, many companies use clean sources such as solar, hydro and battery, however, because energy is in high demand and all the electric utility service provider companies [PG&E, SMUD, SCE, IID and more] use cheap resources, such as coal and natural gas, to create energy that produces air pollution,” said Kaur.

The goal of Kaur’s project is to educate Np3 students on how and when to use energy sources more efficiently.

“Increasingly, the mass consumption and bad production of energy is going to take a lot of trees to clean up, yet we are still ignorant towards this issue and the environment condition keeps deteriorating,” Kaur said.

“In my project, I’m trying to make a long lasting impact on people’s lives so that they become more aware of their effects for their energy consumption and hopefully make good choices regarding the usage of energy” Kaur said.

Previously, Kaur held a tutorial for the Np3 community on educating how to use energy sufficiently with a SMUD representative on campus. However, Kaur also intends to take a more legislative stance.

She intends to get Governor Gavin Newsom and California state legislature on environmental laws to enforce a law passed in 2018 titled SB100. This bill states that all of California will switch 100% to renewable energy by 2045, but according to Kaur, the speed at which the change is occurring is minimal, if at all.

Many companies are finding loopholes to get around the bill and delay the process and not do anything regarding the bill until the last few months of the deadlines mentioned in the bill. The companies run a risk of filing bankruptcy in this issue and get away with their production of mass air pollutants.

Kaur plans to write a letter to get the governor to act upon this law quickly and send this letter to get companies to continuously act on SB100. The letter is in regards to reminding the California state legislature of the correct implementation of SB100 while trying to push for a system where the electric utility service providing companies send reports of continuous progress in changing their energy production resources and provide future goals to meet the SB100 deadline.

Kaur has sent out her letter to the California legislature and hopes to prevent companies from using cheap energy resources to produce energy and get the government enacting on SB100.

If you are interested in learning about efficient usage of energy to create minimum air pollution and save the environment, then contact Lovleen Kaur at [email protected].

 

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