Green energy use is motivated by its environmentally friendly behaviour, provided green jobs, renewability, equal repartition, and economic profitability. The Anthropocene is characterized by dramatic increasing pollutants amounts and earth temperature. Not only industrial activities are responsible for the setting of the Anthropocene. Instead, agriculture byproducts were the main resource of pollution and global warming. So, with increasing agricultural activities using traditional methods, the Anthropocene has been going toward a more polluted and warmer Earth. Nonetheless, using green technologies for agriculture is a candidate to reshape the destiny of the Anthropocene. The use of green energy in agriculture will reduce greenhouse gases and polluting byproducts. Accordingly, the scenario of an Anthropocene marked by an apocalyptic end will change. Global warming and its repercussions including sea level rise, decreasing ice surface, and extreme climatic events will be toned down.
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Green energy, which is any type of energy produced from natural resources such as sunlight, wind or water, has been a fertile field of study (Khoie et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020). Although there are some differences between renewable energy and green energy (Khan et al., 2020), the later usually comes from renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, wind energy, geothermal energy, biomass energy and hydropower. Each of these technologies works in a different way, either absorbing solar energy like solar panels (Dixit, 2020), or using wind turbines (Hübler et al., 2021; Shaterabadi et al., 2020; Voigt, 2021) or water currents to generate electricity (Chowdhury et al., 2020; Pamungkas et al., 2020). Regarded as green energy, a resource does not cause pollution like fossil fuels. This means that not all energy used in renewable energy is environmentally friendly. For example, power generation using the burning of organic materials in sustainable forests can be renewable, but not necessarily environmentally friendly (Almsatar, 2020). Green energy is usually replenished naturally, unlike fossil fuels such as natural gas or coal that require millions of years of development time. The main sources are wind energy, solar energy and hydroelectric power including tidal and waves energy, which uses ocean and sea energy generated by tides and waves (Afsharian et al., 2020). On the other hand, during the Anthropocene, (e.g., Essefi, 2020; Essefi, 2021; Gharsalli et al., 2020), consumption of the traditional energy has caused atmospheric pollution by greenhouse gases (Lee & Lee, 2021). Energy consumption affects directly and indirectly air quality. Air pollution is the result of multiple factors including the direct effect of energy consumption growth and the indirect effect related to the development of mining, metallurgical and chemical industries, road and air traffic, the incineration of household waste, industrial and agricultural waste, etc. Environmental studies argued that, due industrial and agricultural human activities, the trajectory of the Anthropocene is toward a Great Acceleration of curves of all environmental parameters including greenhouse gases, pesticides, organic pollutants, heavy metals, nuclear by-products. Nonetheless, this trajectory may be modified if the production and the use of environmentally friendly energies increase at the expense of the traditional energies that are causing the setting of the Anthropocene conditions and threatening the humanity by apocalyptic scenario. This chapter is meant to follow the evolution of green energy use in agriculture and the potential repercussions on the trajectory of the Anthropocene.