Focusing on energy sources besides fossil fuels should be the goal of attaining global sustainability to thwart climate change, according to UT-Battelle Corporate Fellow and environmental sciences researcher Tom Wilbanks.
"Emissions from fossil fuels are the sources of so many stresses on the environment," Wilbanks says. "The challenge is to come up with new approaches to providing energy to the world that are not associated with fossil fuel emissions and that are much more efficient and deliver services with very little environmental impact."
Wilbanks says new information technology sources available make the study of global sustainability more informative than was the case 40 years ago.
"It gets people involved in finding solutions to sustainability problems who don't know what questions to ask and what science is available," Wilbanks says. "It also gets science out into use faster than if we depend on more traditional ways of communicating."
Wilbanks made his comments during Oak Ridge National Laboratory's observance of Earth Day.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy.