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 * //__Today’s Energy Crisis__//** 1/16/09 Links to other wiki pages: Environmental, Alternative, Sustainable, [|Global], [|Efficiency]

Energy is very necessary in today’s world. It is used to bring heat to people’s homes; it powers planes, trains, and automobiles; and it also runs all of the appliances in people’s homes. The people want to pay less for their energy bill, the energy companies want to spend less money by recycling the energy, and they also don’t want to be responsible for a harmful impact on the environment. The fact is that energy is an everyday necessity to common citizens such as ourselves. We need a cheaper, more efficient, and less harmful way to run things in our home such as the heat, and also kitchen appliances like a stove or oven. Trains that we ride on depend on coal, which badly hurts the environment, and planes rely on massive amounts of oil. More importantly, much of the population drives cars around all of the time. These cars rely on expensive gasoline that is imported mainly from the Middle East. Another possibility is solar, but at least right now it is not powerful enough to run a car. Overall, the energy crisis is imminent, and we need to come up with a renewable energy source that is neither cheap nor harmful to the environment.



There are a number of different solutions to the energy crisis currently taking place in the United States. All of them are technically called alternative energy sources, but only a couple can be labeled as sustainable. There is a significant difference. A sustainable energy source is one that can be used continually. Examples of sustainable energy sources are hydro, solar, and wind. Other possible alternative sources are geothermal, nuclear, and cleaner and cheaper forms of coal and oil. There are significant pros and cons to all of these possibilities. Although there are significant downsides to each of them, including a substantial impact on the environment, there are outweighing upsides. Coal is extremely cheap and oil can become cheaper by not relying on other countries in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Many believe that the increase in energy efficiency is the key to the problem. For example all of the energy that is given off as heat in a light bulb can be recycled. At the moment, energy plants around the world only use about 10-12% of the energy. There are a few plants, however, with new solutions, which are getting up to 50% energy efficiency. Other aspects to this energy crisis include global energy, the environmental impact. The bottom line is that we have to come up with a new energy source, maybe even one of the current alternatives, which has four main features. It is cheap, it does no harm to the environment, it is renewable, and it has a high amount of energy per pound. Some possibilities for the future of these alternatives include new types of wind turbines, and cold fusion, which can possibly be used to safely contain nuclear waste. 