And so, this is the week everyone is feeling all restless and tired! The week after break! The break was not much of a break with all the projects and homework piled up. Anyway, snapping out of the break mode, this week’s lesson was on Energy and World Change, from past, present to future.
Energy is vital to human civilization in today’s day and age. Since the industrial revolution, the consumption of energy has been increasing exponential. Almost everything around us requires energy, our lights, stoves, heaters, cars, airplanes etc. However, the sources of energy that we use today are non-renewable; which mean that ones we use it, it is gone forever. At the rate at which humans are consuming energy in the world, it should not be of a surprise that our resources are depleting. About 78% of the world’s consumption of energy comes from fossil fuels and this is expected to run out in 2060. Only about 19% of our energy are renewable, and these numbers in my opinion, should rise to 80% in the future years. This is to ensure sustainability so that our future generations will not be shortchanged in any way. However, 80% is hardly a possible target within the next 10, 20 years. This is due to our high reliance on fossil fuels and changing to renewable may be hard to adapt. Renewable sources of energy are not as efficient and convenient as fossil fuels for sure, but I believe that advance technology will continuously provide more ways to increase the efficiencies of these alternatives sources of energy.
There are so much potential sources of energy around, which gives us a reason and optimism to believe that we will someday be able to ensure the sustainability of energy. Firstly, the sun is one such potential source of energy. As mentioned in the slides, the sun provides more energy to the Earth in one hour than humankind currently uses in an entire year. Concepts of solar power have already been used, although not much(1.4% consumption of energy). However, if we could invent a more efficient technique to capture the solar energy from the sun, the problem of energy scarcity will be resolved! The concepts of solar power is a stepping stone, who knows perhaps in a few years time, advanced technology will be able to capture 50% of the solar power. Secondly, tornado energy. This was mentioned by one of the presenters today which I thought was quite interesting. Tornados exert a huge amount of energy, and if we could capture some of these energy, we would be able to power households with these energy. Personally I thought that more investments should fund this potential source of energy as discusses in class. Although some classmates addressed the fatal issues that were attached to the idea, I thought that precisely because of the issues, more investments should be pumped in so to reduce or eliminate those. We have exhaust almost every resource we have on Earth, and I feel that if we do not dare to take a step forward to try out different potential sources, we will not ever succeed in attaining sustainability. Therefore, I feel that this source of energy is feasible and more investments should be pumped in to fund research. Lastly, the anti-matter source of energy. Personally, I felt that to use this form of energy is a little overboard because it is truly fatal. We would disappear in a split second when we come in contact with anti-matters. However, like the tornado energy, I feel that we should be daring to try new potential sources to achieve the target we want.
Also, I feel that to be able to achieve sustainability for energy, everyone should play a part. Governments must have strong political will to enforce stricter rules for corporations’ usage of energy or to raise prices of energy. These will act as deterrence to wastage of energy.
Overall, I would rate the lesson 8/10 :)
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