Mans Discovery Of Fossil Fuels Could Be His Downfall. Discus

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coal became widely used for heating, cooking and industrial processes.
Air pollution during the Industrial revolution was far worse than anything seen today. Apart from the smoke and fumes obscuring visibility, they also caused major health problems to the inhabitants of the industrial areas reducing life expectancies, predominantly with respiratory diseases.
The simultaneous development of the internal combustion engine, well drilling technology and the capacity to refine crude oil into gasoline and other liquid fuels (B. Nebel et al 1995) in the late 1880’s, produced an alternative to steam power. Air pollution was greatly reduced as coal-fired steam engines and gasoline and diesel engines, and fuel oil furnaces replaced furnaces.
Due to the length of time it takes to change from one energy technology to another, it was not until the late 1940’s that oil surpassed coal as the worlds major energy source. World oil use peaked in 1979 when daily production passed 66 ...

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up in the region cumulated in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Today fossil fuels provide about 95% of all commercial energy in the world (W. Cunningham et al 1995). Approximately 1,200 million people living in developed, industrialised countries consume over two-thirds of this total energy supply, while less than one-third goes to the 4,100 million people living in the developed world (K.Pickering and L.Owen 1995). This shows a massive difference in energy use between people in the developed and developing nations. On average, each person in the United States and Canada uses about 300 GJ (equivalent to about 60 barrels of oil) per year. By contrast in the poorest countries in the, such as ...

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