Despite winters that are typically cold and snowy, Wisconsin's per capita energy consumption falls right around the median for the nation as a whole. The industrial sector of our state's economy is the largest energy consumer, with energy intensive forest products and metal-castings industries dominating, and food production ranking third.

While these above activities contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the largest single contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in Wisconsin comes from the generation of electricity (32 percent of all emissions). And in Wisconsin, about one-half of our net electrical generation comes from the combustion of coal.

Coal has provided our region with reasonably priced, reliable electricity and area manufacturers and residents have relied on this energy source for decades.

However, the production of electricity from combusting this fossil fuel has a bevy of environmental impacts that call into question the long-term benefits of relying on this currently plentiful, though finite, energy source.

Atmospheric emissions from coal combustion include sulfur and nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, fine particulate matter and mercury, which negatively impact local and regional air quality, precipitation quality, wildlife edibility (i.e., fish consumption advisories due to high mercury concentrations) and human health.

While regional energy companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit their facilities to reduce these emissions to meet emissions standards imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources — with environmentally relevant reductions for most — the one product of combustion that irrefutably continues to rise in our globally shared atmosphere is carbon dioxide.

The October 2014 global concentration averages of 396 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide is 141 percent higher than the pre-industrial peaks of 280 ppm measured over the previous half-million years, and that additional carbon dioxide is altering our planet's climate at an alarming pace. The pace of our anthropogenically induced climate change is on a far different scale than the acknowledged, natural climate changes associated with subtle differences in insulation due to cyclical quirks in the Earth's orbital eccentricity, obliquity and precession.

The rapid rise in carbon dioxide in the last century is associated with a documented 1.4 degrees of temperature rise, and 2014 may still prove to be the hottest year on record. If current emission trends continue the planet's atmospheric temperature will likely rise by an additional 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Most current scientific research indicates that amount of warming would cause near-term (this century) droughts, food and water shortages, reduced terrestrial ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels and coastal flooding. Such events would clearly have dire consequences for the world's population and the global economy.

So what could — and I would argue should — we do here in eastern Wisconsin to join with the growing number of political entities that are pledging and actually trying to reduce their carbon emissions? In a recent, community based ThinkHaus ( discussion hosted at Jake's Café in Sheboygan, I posited that our region is actually well positioned to move forward with cleaner, more sustainable energy sources.

Wisconsin's formal energy policy goal is for all newly installed electricity generation capacity to come from renewable energy resources to the extent that it is cost-effective and technically feasible. Unfortunately, renewable resources currently provide less than 10 percent of Wisconsin's net electricity generation, and most of that comes from hydroelectric power plants, biomass generation (mostly wood and wood waste) and the rest is from wind.

While our region has relatively modest onshore wind energy potential, there is much additional wind resource potential offshore in the Wisconsin portion of the Great Lakes — most notably Lake Michigan. Additionally, small-scale photovoltaic installations are becoming more economically and technically viable options for residential and small-scale commercial installations, even here in the upper Midwest.

Our prodigious dairy industry is also involved, as Wisconsin leads the nation in animal waste-to-energy systems, with on-farm digesters that can turn manure into fuel.

None of the above solutions are a panacea to our electrical needs and we are currently a net importer of electricity, but the scalability of adding small-scale capacity may make adding such projects economical compared to the billions of dollars it would take to create additional capacity from traditional, large scale combustion plants.

Ideally, the impetus to create cleaner generating sources of electricity will come from private industry or from private and public collaborations as market demands for sustainably produced electricity increase. Adding electrical capacity from cleaner, sustainable sources will benefit our local and global environments and attract businesses looking to relocate in areas with sustainably produced electricity—all without increasing our carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

Paul C. Pickhardt is Associate Professor of Biology and chairman of Natural Sciences at Lakeland College. He is a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served as a science teacher in the Republic of Kiribati, a country now officially moving its inhabitants to other countries due to rising sea levels.

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