President Obama and Stevenn Chu's Ideas on Energy

Obama and Chu have very similar thoughts when it comes to energy. When it comes to the idea of renewable energy they both agree that the world should start using this cleaner and more efficient energy sources. Obama has a plan that by 2012, 10% of our electricity will be form renewable sources. And, by 2025, he wants 25% of electricity from renewable sources. Obama actually wants to start wind farms on the ocean shores to get more energy from them. Steven Chu wants to start using solar power more than any other renewable source. He wants to start using solar paint to put on the new buildings. When it comes to nonrenewable energy sources they both agree that we should start reducing the amounts used, and also reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Steven Chu wants to reduce the use of coal and turn it into a liquid because it is cleaner.
For drilling for fuel in Alaska, it was voted against.
And for hybrid cars, they both want to start using them more often. Steven Chu wants the cars to go 40 miles a charge at least.
These are the main ideas on the energy situation from Obama and Steven Chu.

Explaination of concept Map

A lot of things have to go into the idea to change our energy sustainability. It's not as easy as it seems. There are a lot of things to take into consideration. Such as efficiency, population growth, and cost. There is also global politics, and the types of energy (renewable and non-renewable). Then things continue to branch off those and the pattern keeps continuing on. This concept map show many of the ideas that go into energy sustainability.

(concept map set as main blog picture)

Concept Map of Energy Sustainability

1. Two trends in our concept map are cost and population growth. When the population continues to grow, we have to have more energy to support everyone on the earth. This means we have to buy/produce more energy. Buying and producing leads to us spending more money, making the cost of our energy rise.

2. Importing oil and building the materials that would be used for energy sources have a time delay effect. For getting some energy sources we have to have special ways of getting the energy. For example, gas. We have to build drills to get the gas from the ground. Building these drills takes lots of time, which makes us have to wait to get the gas. Another time delay is from importing oil. It takes a long time to get the oil from the other countries supplying it.

3. Building solar panels and wind mills have a feedback loop to cost. When we build these sources, it costs more than the Americans want to spend, which leads to a problem in us getting to actually use them, which leads to our non-renewable energy sources running out.

4. Gas companies can buy out the people who invented electric cars so that gas companies stay in business. Also, foreign gas companies can choose not to sell us fuel and cut the United States off making it so we can't use most of our electronics like cars and planes don't work.

Bibliorgaphy

http://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/interactives/energy/energy.html

http://www.goodgreentips.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/earth-day-earth-in-hands.jpg

Resources:

http://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/interactives/energy/- if you go to this site and run the simulation, you will find that we are not meeting energy demands and we are exceeding the CO2 level.

Generate possible solutions

If we decrease the amount of energy demand use from 2% to 1% it would help pave the way for a much simpler solution to our energy problem. Also, if we change our energy efficencey to .50% a year and increase our carbon collection and storage to 0.4, we will easily be able to solve the engergy crisis. We would need to decrease our coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power and increase the use of biofuel, solar, wind, and water power. We would then need to decrease our use of coal, and oil by 10% and increase our use of the renweable resources each decade. Doing this would safely give us enough energy until at least the year 2100.

Understanding The Problem:

With the way things are going now, our main non-renewable sources are going to run out within the next few decades. We are not being efficient enough with our energy. We are using way to much Oil, Coal, and Gas. When they run out, we will be at a major loss for energy. Right now, people are demanding energy that we cant even provide. We need to figure out a new way to get energy that can support our needs, and last for a long time. Also, at the rate we are going, we will exceed the CO2 level that is suppose to be in the atmosphere. So we also need a haelthier way to get energy.