Alternative Energy

Continuously coughing while driving down the road, Maggie, a seventy-year-old woman presently living in Bend, Oregon makes her way towards the physician. Twice a month she has to drive just three blocks down the street to the doctor's office to pick up her medication. Maggie has to use the medication to ease her breathing problems caused by the devastating pollution in the big city. Only fifty years ago, Bend was a beautiful, small city with clear skies and thousands of lush, green trees. In the winter, hundreds of tourists would flock to the town for winter sports at Mount Bachelor.

Now, Bend is a terribly polluted mass of buildings, streets, and people. Instead of tourists visiting in the winter for skiing and snowboarding, they come for the warm temperatures and a fresh tan. Over the years, the pollution build up from nuclear power plants and the carbon dioxide from automobiles caused the city to have hideous smog problems. The constant exhaust protruding from the tail pipes of millions of cars across the globe caused the year-round temperatures to shoot up unstoppably. If the human race does not change the current lifestyle, this sad tale could one day be a reality.

To prevent this from happening alternative energy sources should be used more frequently throughout the world. Alternative energy sources are underutilized resources that need to be embraced and used before too much harm is done to the earth, and it is too late to reverse the effects. Although many people think that it is too costly to convert to an alternative energy source, such as solar power, the money that is spent to switch from one source to another is eventually regained due to lower electrical bills.

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A couple living in Pennsylvania has a solar photovoltaic system mounted on their roof, which generates the power needed to live. The generator then sends any extra power back to a main electrical grid causing the electric meter to spin backward, thus saving the couple hundreds of dollars. In one year, the couple generated almost five hundred more kilowatt-hours of electrical power than they needed. Having the extra electricity meant virtually no electrical bills for the entire year; the two only had to pay sixty-one dollars of customer-service fees in 2001, rather than 560 dollars of electrical bills in 1993 (Heavens).

If one couple's electric bill were that high in 1993, imagine how much higher it would be now. With solar power as a main source of energy, hundreds of dollars a year can be saved on electricity, eventually saving vast amounts of money for users. Some people may agree that using an alternative energy source, such as solar power, will save money, but do not want to convert because forms of alternative energy are not very widely and readily available.

While it is true that there are not large amounts of various forms of alternative energy available, it is also true that more are defiantly needed. Recent blackouts have shown that there are too many people and not enough energy. According to a national trade group for utilities, the Edison Electric Institute, "[t]housands of small neighborhood blackouts occur each year in the USA, lasting from a few seconds to a few hours" (Iwata 3b). Along with those small blackouts, there were also 324 large and midsize blackouts and more than a dozen super-blackouts from 1984 to 2000.

All of these blackouts are still occurring, even though the North American grid is regarded as the most advanced in the world (Iwata 3b). If there could be more energy available, then there would not be as many blackouts across the nation and people would not have to deal with going without power. While many alternative energy sources can help reduce blackouts, they can also help people maintain a healthier lifestyle by cutting down on smog problems. While driving in a car, more fuel-efficient driving habits can help a great deal in reducing pollution and smog in the city.

For every one-liter of fuel that is saved, almost two and a half kilograms of carbon dioxide are kept from entering the atmosphere. Keeping the carbon dioxide from entering the air prevents smog problems, and with less smog problems numerous health problems can be reduced in the population. Many people suffer from asthma and respiratory illnesses because of so many automobiles across the globe, and, 5,000 people in Canada alone die a year from smog in the city ("Breathe" 16).

If Canada has 5,000 deaths per year from smog, then thousands more people die across the world just from the pollution-causing exhaust fumes trailing out of vehicles around the planet. If more people use alternative fuel cars or hybrid electric cars, hundreds of people can be kept healthier because of less pollution. Along with being healthier for people, alternative energy sources help save the ozone layer, preventing more damage to the earth from occurring.

According to estimates, the overall global temperature has increased five to nine degrees Fahrenheit since the last ice age (Stevens 60). This temperature fluctuation does not seem like a big deal, but with another one to six-degree raise in temperature expected by the year 2100 (Stevens 59), ocean levels could raise destroying wildlife habitats, ocean ecosystems, and seaside cities. Also, tropical storms could become more severe, destroying any lasting cities along the coastal regions of the earth (Stevens 60).

When using alternative energy sources, people can help to save the ozone layer from too much damage, helping the entire planet. Not only do alternative energy sources help to save the ozone layer, but they also help to prevent nuclear wastes from harming the earth. Nuclear power plants use radioactive materials to create energy, and after they are done with the materials, they are buried in the ground. The radioactive material that is buried in the ground, depending on the type, can cause death to many organisms by slowing killing all the cells due to radiation.

For the organisms that do not die, they can either get cancer, or some sort of mutation in their reproductive cells causing damage to future generations (Weber 22). Some of the wastes from nuclear power plants can be harmful for three to five hundred years and other can be up in the millions (Weber 26). If the waste is harmful for hundreds or even millions of years, than we not only have to worry about health risks for current generations, but also the future generations across the globe.

For the future generations, if the waste is harmful for so many years, the less populated areas that are now used for disposing of these wastes may one day be extremely populous regions around the country. When using nuclear power there are large amounts of harmful wastes to worry about, but with an alternative energy source, there are no harmful wastes that put risks to people's health and environmental health. There are many different forms of alternative energy sources, all of which need to be more widely embraced and applied to current methods, otherwise too much irreversible damage could be done to the earth.

The environment and the health of the human population both need protection from pollution, otherwise cities which are currently relatively small and still have clear skies and green trees, may one day end up with little amounts of trees, overgrown populations and terrible pollution problems. The global climate will rise and land destroyed by nuclear wastes could still be harmful if humans have too much contact with the area. If the human race does not discover better, less destructive ways of creating energy, then who knows what the world may one day look like?

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