Not all ICE is created equal.

Good ICE and bad ICE. It’s important this distinction is highlighted to as many people as possible.

Let’s start off by defining what we mean by both:

• Good ICE — frozen water, found mostly across the earth’s glaciers.
• Bad ICE — acronym for the Internal Combustion Engine, an “engine which generates motive power by the burning of petrol, oil, or other fuel with air inside the engine, the hot gases produced being used to drive a piston or do other work as they expand”.

I’m sure you see where we are going with this. Read on though…

No doubt, the internal combustion engine was one of the 19th century’s greatest innovations and has continued to have a huge impact in the 21st century. We drive, live, travel, fly, work, ship and even eat as a result of power generated from an internal combustion engine.

Although this technology has been adopted in ships, aircraft and trains, two thirds of the world’s internal combustion engines are used within the automotive sector. Over the last decade, annual global car passenger production alone has increased from around 50 million units in 2009 to over 70 million units in 2018 — and that’s before you count commercial vehicles.

Surely that’s a good thing? More car production reflects the rise in middle class populations across the world and the thriving global trade. Yes, but remember: for an internal combustion engine to run, it needs to be fed with fossil fuels i.e. natural gas or petroleum products such as diesel, petrol, fuel oil, etc. And every year there’s effectively 70 million more cars demanding these fuels, which makes the resulting scale of emissions a ‘scary’ contributor to global warming.

Hence, the increasingly serious concern for the future of good ICE.

The survival of earth’s glaciers — the biggest store of freshwater reserves we have (75% of the world’s freshwater) - depends on how successful we are in replacing bad ICE as the world’s conventional transport mechanism.

Unfortunately, a significant and irreversible amount of damage to good ICE reserves has already been done. Here’s some of the examples cited by the National Geographic recently:

• “In Montana’s Glacier National Park the number of glaciers has declined to fewer than 30 from more than 150 in 1910.”
• “The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80 percent since 1912.”
• “Glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya in India are retreating so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035.”
• “Thawing permafrost has caused the ground to subside more than 15 feet (4.6 meters) in parts of Alaska.”

All this will continue to drive a rise in sea levels and volumes, at a rate which has already gone past the average rate of the past two to three thousand years — and is still rising!

There are no easy solutions to this challenge. One thing’s certain though, our ability to replace our bad ICE and save our good ICE will depend on the individual choices we make as to how we choose to power our homes and our vehicles.

If you are interested in joining the zero emission movement, check out ChargeBound’s website and the solutions we are creating to make this possible for each household.