We are looking for for alternative sources of energy today . There are unlike quite a few different reasons why . One reason is that we simply want to become more energy independent in the United States , and for us that partly means no longer needing to buy and important a lot of oil from places that are hostile to us such as the Middle East and Venezuela. We get the majority of our imported oil from north of the border in Canada, and we produce about 50% of our own oil (which we don’t sell to anyone overseas because we use up all of our oil), but our modern American civilization requires tons of energy and thus tons of oil , so we continually need to get our oil from people who just plain don’t like us . Yet, our government feels pressured from “green” groups not to allow any more areas for drilling to be opened up in our own country, and therefore we are now driven to seek out alternative energy sources to fossil fuels.
Today thanks in part to the green groups, polution is a area that we as a society have become aware of and are starting to work on . Coal and oil refining and burning produce large amounts of pollution over time, and so do the aging electrical power grids that they support. Oil spills in the ocean usually don’t happen, but when they do they are absolutely disastrous. We also don’t want to fight the fire while we’re feeding the flames–we want to set out cleaning up our ugly, smelly land fills and other areas of pollution, so why should we continue to create more pollution with our energy production while we try to clean all this up? We have actually been getting cleaner as a society since the early 1970s, but people today are more mindful of pollution than ever before, and so the push is on to eradicate as much of it as possible–again, this means finding alternative fuel sources.
In fact one of the alternative fuels that we are interested in today is biofuel . There are different sources of biofuels and it turns out that one of these can be the decaying matter in our landfills. So, burning the waste chemicals of the landfills (which burn cleanly) is an alternative way of generating energy that would also decrease the landfills, ridding us of much pollution. Universities and some private companies are working on this technology at the time of this writing.
Other sources of biofuels are food crops such as corn and soy beans . However, many people are opposed to using much of these because as of right now the fossil fuel energy required to create the biofuels defeats their whole purpose, and because critics point out that it’s not usually a good idea to burn one’s food just to be able to drive one’s car. So research into more efficient ways of devising biofuels continues, but holds much promise.
Solar energy is the most well known alternative energy source . Solar panels continue to become better, cheaper, and more miniaturized and of course they create zero pollution, but we probably have another century to go before we can rely heavily, as a society, upon solar energy.
One of the most intriguing alternative energy sources being developed today is geothermal energy. This simply harnesses the heat that wells up below the earth’s crust and it is a zero-pollution energy source. Much development of geothermal plants still needs to be done, however.
Other leading alternative energy source concepts are wind energy and atomic energy . However, both face stiff opposition–wind energy because the number of windmills that would need to be in place to make it practical is daunting to ponder, and atomic energy mostly because it is not well understood by the general populace and because “green groups” oppose the need to store the nuclear waste material.
We have a very long way to go before we can rely practically on alternative energy instead of today’s main sources of energy , still we move a little more in the right direction with each passing day
