Environmental and Health Implications of Processing, Harvesting, Distribution and Using both Renewable and Non-renewable Energy Sources

The harvesting, processing, distribution, and use of fuels and other sources of energy have major environmental implications. About half of the world’s population use solid fossil and biomass fuels for domestic cooking and heating in simple devices that produce large amounts of air pollution, which is probably responsible for 4–5 percent of the global burden of disease. In this review, the principal environmental and health impacts of energy are discussed. Among the issues examined are the risk and health hazards posed from various forms of convectional energy such as coal, oil and gas exploration, while for renewable forms of energy, risk and hazards from biomass, hydro, geothermal as well as nuclear were also examined. The review concluded that there are many damaging effects from the processing, harvesting, distribution and utilization of energy on both human and ecology. Notable among these are major land-use changes due to fuel cycles such as coal, petroleum based, biomass, and hydropower, which have implications for the natural as well as human environment. Other damaging effects are the routine and accidental release of pollutants, which disperse a wide variety of biologically and climatologically active elements and compounds into the atmosphere, surface waters, and soil at rates far beyond the natural flows of these substances. The review noted that some of the resulting diseases are asthma, malaria, tuberculosis, and lung cancer among others. Keywords: - Disease, ecology, energy, environment, hazards, human health