An article titled "3 Energy Sources Other than Petroleum" demonstrates this economic principle by arguing first, that “it’s not whether we can switch or not, but how much time it would take before we could accomplish a switch.” We can switch but people would be very hesitant because of cost and because we would be changing from the norm. The oil company controls the energy market and until we run out it will be hard to make a switch.
Second, 86.5% of the world's energy currently comes from non-renewable energy sources. Even though there are three strong options of renewable energy like, solar, wind, and hydroelectric, energy resources like this and others only account for 13.5% of earth's energy. While this number is increasingly growing it will take decades due to the fact that oil is controlling the current economy and won’t let energy sources switch.
Third, the ecological footprint we are leaving behind is tremendous. 68% of oil use is used for transportation and “The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) report of 300 scientists and commissioned by the eight nations bordering the Arctic has concluded that more than 50% of the Arctic ice will melt by the end of the century, including parts of the Greenland ice cap. A complete melting of the Greenland ice cap would raise sea levels by 23 feet.”. With all this in play it is still determined that we must use oil even though we can afford other energy sources.
In my next blog post I will research the question: What are alternate sources of energy besides oil?
I found it interesting that only 13.5% of the worlds energy comes from renewable sources.
ReplyDeleteI think that it would be interesting if you focused on some of the externalities of the other renewable sources.