Sustainable Energy Sources

Sustainable Energy Sources

Energy is life. Life on this planet depends upon a fixed amount of energy. The modern industrialized energy sources such as coal and petroleum were originally utilized for their seeming promiscuity and high energies yielded per unit volume. The world has now become painfully aware of how finite petroleum reserves are, not to mention the political complications associated with being dependent upon foreign countries for an energy supply. To add insult to injury, the limitedness of petroleum resources is not the most pressing problem, their polluting byproducts are. The enormous amounts of byproduct waste that finds its way into our environment is having effects which even the most renowned of experts cannot determine in magnitude. Speaking from an economic standpoint, petroleum will soon become more expensive to find and utilize than reasonable alternatives, raising it’s costs far above it’s benefits. Some could already make the point that the social and environmental costs never were weighed appropriately into the cost/benefit analysis of petroleum and that the benefits associated with petroleum combustion have rarely or never outweighed it’s costs. This point will gain a painful clarity in the years to come if the predictions of some meteorologists come true and the effects of global warming are felt. For years developing societies have been taking enormous amounts of potential energy locked within pressurized biomass that took millions of years to store in the Earth’s crust and releasing it into today’s world. The Earth is a relatively closed system and the enormous release of spent energy and its polluting byproducts will have untold effects upon societies for generations to come. The most brazen ...

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