engleski

AUTOMOTIVE FUEL AS ENVIRONMENTAL FACTOR

The problems treated in this paper are based on certain claims and, above all, alarming facts such as e.g.: • The growth in the manufacture and turnover of material goods are directly connected with the development of the social community in which then the consumption of energy resources is increased as well. • The growing demand for energy resources is becoming increasingly one of the very serious causes that influence the environment, mainly regarding air, soil and water pollution on the Earth. • The latest scientific research (drilling of the Antarctic ice up to three kilometres in depth) have proven the concentrations of greenhouse gases – such as methane and carbon dioxide – currently greater than ever during the last 440 thousand years. • In the global worldwide dimensions, apart from households, heating plants and thermal power plants, as well as industrial production – the traffic by transport means (mainly road vehicles propelled primarily by petrol and diesel fuel) represent the most significant polluter of the human environment regarding the atmosphere, since there are more than 700 thousand cars participating daily in traffic. • The available hard and exact data and their professional analyses provide a real assumption that the moment is rather near (around the year 2010), when the world will start to feel the shortage of the currently expensive oil which is the basis of the modern civilisation and whose limited production accompanied by record prices would endanger the global economic recovery. • Respecting the considerations of scientists according to whom sooner or later, the development of modern technologies and the application of their achievements will result in overall catastrophe – it is logical to conclude that the technology of automotive industry and the usage of cars certainly have their significant share in this apocalypse. Within this context the question is raised: ARE THERE ANY REASONABLE ALTERNATIVES?! Some of the possible answers are the topic of this paper.

fuel; ecology; automotive manufacture and exploitation; oil production and consumption

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