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.