Energy and World change

This week’s discussion was on energy and how it affected the world.

Currently, the world is generating energy through the use of fossil fuels which not only are not renewable, also pollute the environment and cause global warming.

The world’s primary way of generating energy now is unsustainable. We will burn out all our resources by about 2050. This would mean that our children and grandchildren would not have the resources they need to grow. It may lead to another dark ages for humanity.

A lot of the world’s attention is now on green ways to create energy. The so called green revolution. The Obama administration has been saying that it is a sector that will produce jobs and china is the world’s greatest investor in green tech.

Yet ironically, some of these countries do not sign the kyoto protocol cause they say that it will hinder their growth. Furthermore, with the world current financial crisis, most of the world governments have either scaled back or retracted past promises of investments into this sector.

To go green, not only does it involve the government, the people also need to play a part. We must be able to lower our demand of energy. Not only that, we msut be able to accept a higher cost of energy. Right now, all our energy cost are just the base cost of burning fossil fuels,

It does not include the external cost of burning the fossil fuel. One way which the governments had tried to internalise the external cost is the use of carbon taxes but without a global imitative, the high polluting industries will just move to countries that are not under such a scheme which defeats its purpose once again.

Companies should also play a part by investing money into trying to make their processes green. Not only will these result in lower energy costs as their processes are more efficient, they may also be able to market their innovative processes and sell them.