It looks like, or at least I think I’m a conversational writer. Is it a bad thing or what? I don’t know what to think, but I need to work on dropping this problem. I won’t be able to write very good research papers if I make them conversational. This is where I leave things like. “Wow really, And what about that, or get ready for a real problem. Its got to be better to write with knowledge of what I’m writing and not lead people to what I think.
My last paper is not going to be all that good. I think I’ll post it below so anyone can read it. You tell me if I put to much of myself into the research.
People of the sun
In a few minutes of your time, this paper is going to change the way you think about the future of electricity. We have for a long time used whatever resource’s that were available to make power. At one point we depended on wood and oil to keep us warm, and to light our homes. As time went on electricity was invented to supply most of our energy needs. We still use oil, and coal to produce electricity, but using fossil fuel isn’t a long time fix. We have nuclear energy, but then again there are problems. Now, in our time we have many more issues with how to produce energy than at any time in the lifetime of man. We need to look at what solar energy can do to better fill our needs.
As we increase in population, we use more and more natural resources to produce products and energy. Since man has looked for ways to keep him warm, cook his food, and light the darkness, he has used natural resources. It started with wood, then oil and coal. These are good fuels, but they present one problem, they are not renewable at a rate that can sustain the population. Natural gas has a reserve of 90 years (Rotman). All the natural resources we use are depleting. The forests of Europe were used up to build ships. The whales of the world were almost put into extinctions for the oil they produce. We use oil at a rate that cannot outlive our current needs.
What can we look forward to in the future? The main problem with fuels is that we need to burn them to transfer the stored energy in them. Not so bad for small consumption, but we are talking about the world. As we burn more of these fuels, we contribute to the overall polluting of our environment. We are contaminating the world in ways that take years to undo. Nuclear energy will leave waste that we need to store for 10,000 years (Ewing). “Oil not only burns unclean, but we have the daily risk of an oil spill” (Hyung). We are working on ways to improve the burning of coal for energy, but have a long way to go. In an article by Mark Rowe, he said, “It points out that coal is considered as the dirtiest and most wasteful of the fossil fuels since it has half the caloric value and double the carbon dioxide emissions of natural gas” (Rowe).
We are destroying the earth as we know it. We can’t keep doing the things the same way and expect our lives to not change. We will change, and we don’t have a choice. So what’s the answer to the problem? We need a new form of energy to produce the majority of the energy we need. Not only will we not be able to continue to grow in population, but we will kill off much of what we have lived to know. “Getting a good handle on the impacts of climate change has been hard because there are no crisp answers” (Victor). As it was stated earlier, the storage on nuclear was will be 10,000 years, and we don’t even know if we are storing it correctly. We don’t even know how to store it. “Nuclear waste can kill a person standing three feet away in seconds” (Nuclear Waste). The products we use now for energy like oil, natural gas, and coal do not regenerate, so we will run out of them. The one source of energy that isn’t polluting the environment is solar energy.
We need a plan that will put a long term solution to this problem. Smog, global warming, reserve depletion, and our need for sources outside our own country are not working in our favor. We don’t need to put our country in hock for fuel to survive. We consume 85 million barrels of oil a day (Strahan). How can we keep burning that much oil every day of our lives? We used over a million tons of coal in 2009 (Monthly Energy Review). Even other renewable energy sources are not completely environmental clean. Each wind turbine has two gearboxes, hydraulic fluids and other waste products. The hydroelectric generators block our rivers. Solar is one source that has very few mechanical drives.
Now we have some facts to make an informed decision. Nuclear power is here to stay, it’s in place. After putting such vast resources into a project like the development of nuclear energy, we won’t throw it away. One day we hope this source will be safe so we won’t need a security detail around it at all times. Wind power is a large and growing industry that the government has recently become active with. For the most part, they have been subsidized for years by the government so as to be profitable. Now the one area that could use more help is the solar industry. Solar energy is the only resource that can be located at the locations needed. Solar power is the only source that won’t put a strain on power switching stations, and transmission lines. They can be at the home where they will be used. They are the true users of a natural resource, the sun. As Garret Keizer said, “We can only change the world by changing the world” (Keizer 299). We need a plan that will be productive in the long run, providing us with safe clean energy. Renewable energy not only solves an energy need, it will repair what damage we have done in the past. If we commit to the problem, we can solve the problem. Can we afford to let change take its natural course? Now we see what renewable energy is, and we can decide on our choice.
Works Cited
"6 Coal." Monthly Energy Review (2010): 79-87. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 13 Mar. 2010.
Allen, John E. "Winds of Change." Scientific American 302.3 (2010): 8. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 7 Mar. 2010.
Hyung Chul Kim, Fumihiko, et al. "Life Cycle Optimization of Automobile Replacement: Model and Application." Environmental Science & Technology 37.23 (2003): 5407-5413. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 9 Mar. 2010.
Keizer, Garret. “Why We Hate Teachers.” 1969. Fields of Reading. 8th Ed. Nancy R. Comley, Et Al. Boston: Bedford/St Martin, 2007. 292-300. Print
"NUCLEAR WASTE." Ecologist 36.5 (2006): 54-55. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 9 Mar. 2010.
Rowe, Mark. "The BURNING question." Geographical (Circle Publishing) 81.6 (2009): 30-37. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 9 Mar. 2010.
Rotman, David. "Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map." Technology Review 112.6 (2009): 44-51. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 9 Mar. 2010.
Strahan, David. "Scraping the bottom of the barrel. (Cover story)." New Scientist 204.2737 (2009): 34-39. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 13 Mar. 2010.
Victor, David G. "The Green in the Machine." National Interest 106 (2010): 75-85. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 13 Mar. 2010.
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