steven chu and obama.

Coal: Steven Chu believes that coal is his "worst enemy". He says that he doesn't know if there will be a solution to coal, but to keep fossil fuels in the energy protfolio, we need to be using more clean burning coal. Also he will put more time into coal reseach and twards building the nation's first zero-emission, "clean coal" power plant in Illinois. Obama also wants to keep this reseach alive.
Nuclear Power: Steven Chu is nuetral about nuclear power because he believes it is a good source of energy yet we have no where to store it because we have already filled up Yucca mountain. We need to find ways to re-usse this energy so we aren't poluting our planet.
Climate Change: He says that climate change is a huge issue, the evidence is beoming more and more clear over the last 5 years that we need to spread more awareness to the people. He is now part of the Copenhagen Climate Council to0 do just that.

Concept Map

Patterns in our concept map are that as the population grows the more problems enviornmentally occur. For instance as population grows, our recources become scarce and nuclear/toxics grow. A cause and effect is that the more non renewable recources we use, the more were going to run out of them. a time delay example is using fossil fuel and later on is effects on the ozone layer/ green house effects this causes climate change. a leverage point would be if we quit having babies then the polution would be greatly reduced because the less people in the world there are, the less bodies there are to polute it.

Bibliography

Simulation:

http://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/interactives/index.php

A Possible Solution to our Existing Problem.

one possible solution is that we could slowly make a switch of our resources. for instance, we could start using water power for electricity intsead of coal. or we could use geo-thermal instead of oil. another possible solution could be that we would find another planet with resources in it, like in the movie that everybody loves called Star Wars.

Gathering Information..

we could use a "energy lab" to help determine the time it would take to switch resources. this would help by showing how large of a timeline we would need to switch over, Also we would need to know what resources we switch out. such as using water to power electricity.

The Problem With our Consumption...

The problem with our energy consumption at this moment is that we are using up all of our non-renewable resources. but, we have other renewable resources like solar. this is a problem because we could one day run out, and we cant just switch resources in a day, it would take many years to change our main types of energy resources. if we dont start our switch now though, we will run out of resources for switching later. each year we use more and more energy from resources like coal but instead we could be using ones like wind energy. all in all, there is an obvious problem that is begging to be fixed for our world.

Understanding The Problem...

3. With the problem being that we are using more non-renewable resources over renewable resources, We are eventually going to run out of the non-renewable resources. But, it's not possible to just make a sudden switch from using energy sources like coal and gas to bio fuel and solar, which is also a large part of the problem. Just being able to figure out how to make the switch from the un eco-friendly energy sources to eco-friendly sources takes thought about how it will effect us not only now but in the long run. If we stop using all the gases, coal and oil we won't be producing enough energy for all the energy we consume (still needing about 82 EJ energy). Also, we cannot stay on the path we are on using as much gas, oil and coal as we are because after just six decades we would be past our goal of an atmospheric CO2 level of 550 and be over 575.

U.S Energy Consumption

Yes, a problem does exist with the U.S energy consumption. The problem is that we are using more of the non-renewable resources over the renewable resources. This means that we'll soon run out of our non-renewable resources like uranium and petroleum. We could switch over to renewable resources, but it is expensive. Also we are just looking at the small picture by using the non-renewable resources and not considering the long run, the renewable resources. For example, we are using more coal than we can produce. In addition, we import more oil than we use from our own land. All the non-renewable substances are manufactured and are easy to make, yet the renewable substances are costly to use but much healthier for our ecosystem. One solution is we could use both non-renewable and renewable resources, but we could slowly use more renewable resources until the non-renewable resources are out of the picture.