According to an interview published recently in the newspaper El Mundo with the Professor of Civil Engineering and environmental issues at Stanford University, Mark Jacobson,the total cost of air pollution in Spain is approximately 92,000 million euros, or 7.7% of GDP”. This is about 1,825 euros per person.
In the light of his math, it is obvious that the climate change is taking its toll. A toll which costs money and, what is worse, also costs our health. And, as Jacobson says, after combining current concentrations of contaminants, population and relative risk, premature deaths caused by pollution in our country amount to some 27,000 a year. The medical causes? Cardiovascular, respiratory diseases and complications caused by asthma.
However, the expert in clean energy says that this situation can change, that the solution to this waste of money and the deficiency in our quality of life is in our hands and is not an impossible utopia, as some try to make us believe. The key to this is, of course, in renewable sources of energy: wind, hydraulic and solar power.
It seems that the moment has come, not only to dream of a new and healthier world, but to work at it to make it possible. And to achieve this we must also change our way of thinking: clean energy, that seems more expensive, is actually less costly for everybody, because it makes us consume much less.
As Jacobson states in his interview, in Spain, thanks to this system, “each person would save 140 euros a year on electricity”. Furthermore, there would not have to be any job losses, since there would be a transfer from the fossil energy industry to the clean energy industry, creating in our country up to 182,000 jobs after this conversion.
