Energy Conservation

In today’s world, most of us know that it is important to turn off lights and other electrical appliances to conserve energy, but not everyone understands that the reason for the emphasis on cutting back on the use of energy is due to the inevitable depletion of our environment’s nonrenewable resources. Of course, electric power is not the only factor that has lead to our supply of nonrenewable resources declining in recent decades. The overdependence on natural gas and oil to fuel our cars and to heat our homes has also been a huge contributing factor. Although mining minerals does not have a direct effect on energy and the resulting campaign to conserve it, this mining does also contribute to our nonrenewable resources becoming depleted.

Considering that nonrenewable resources are a major energy force in powering our homes, businesses, and even our transportation, it is not hard to see where the problem with using them up lies. People have become reliant upon these sources and have started taking them for granted because they have just always been there. The use of electricity is a great example of how people take our resources for granted. Uninhibited use of electrical powered items, such as lights, televisions, computers, and other appliances has lead to using more coal than necessary to power our homes and businesses. Excessive use of natural gas to heat our homes is also wasteful and contributes to the decline of non-renewable resources. A third energy related problem is the overuse of oil. Instead of walking, car-pooling, or using public transportation, many people choose to drive, thus resulting in an excessive overuse of natural oil. This excessive and uninhibited use of non-renewable resources has lead to a very real concern that one day these resources will be completely depleted. Once these resources are gone there is no way of getting them back. The problem is that if these resources are depleted, our main sources of energy are gone for good.

There are many factors that contribute to and cause the depletion of the world’s non-renewable resources. Those factors include current, past, and future human consumption of these resources and locations of known reserves (Suslick and Machado, n.d.). The ways in which these non-renewable resources are being used by current, past, and future human populations has lead to a significant decrease in the amount of available resources. Wasteful usage by humans is the major factor, but it could also be said that laziness is a factor in human consumption. Instead of looking for and cultivating other ideas and resources that could be used as easily and cheaply as these non-renewable resources, humans have continued to use those sources and depend on someone else to find a solution to the problem.

Locations of known reserves also affect the future of our nonrenewable resources. Currently, many of the well known fossil fuel reserves are not located in the United States, much less in the Western Hemisphere. This leads to our precious resources having to be imported and thus being more expensive for the average American citizen. The added expense of having to import from other countries is another reason that Americans should consider lowering their usage of energy supplies.

Although excessive human consumption of our natural resources has many negative impacts, there are currently a few positive impacts that humans have had on the depletion of nonrenewable energy resources. In the past humans have not been as informed or as concerned about conserving our natural resources as they are now. Technological advancements and sheer human concern are to be thanked for this concern. We now have many famous figures that are currently campaigning against the total destruction and depletion of our natural resources. The realization that the problem of a declining supply of resources has been a huge factor in making humans more concerned and willing to help conserve those resources for future generations.

While humans have become more informed of the problems associated with uninhibited usage of our natural resources, there are still many others that have not, and the problems continue to escalate. The many negative impacts of humans on the depletion of natural resources are very visible. Internal corruption, unethical business practices, violation of indigenous people, and environmental degradation are just a few of the major human impacts (Dell, 2004).

Greedy businesses have committed many unethical practices and acts of corruption because of their desires to capitalize on the need for nonrenewable resources to provide energy. According to Melissa Dell (2004), “Oil and mineral companies are currently not required by law to reveal how much they award for extraction rights, making it extremely easy for politicians to embezzle natural resource monies.” This is only one example of how humans have exploited the human population’s use of nonrenewable resources.

Another huge human impact resulting from excessive consumption of these resources is they have violated the rights of indigenous people to acquire access to reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas (Dell, 2004). These businesses that come to the fossil fuel fertile lands come in and start exploiting the area by building roads, robbing their lands of its innocence, and corrupting those same indigenous people.

Human impact on environmental degradation is very obvious. The mining for natural resources have tarnished lands and made it hard for animal and plant habits to thrive in these areas. The constant burning and use of these fossil fuels also contribute to atmospheric issues, which in turn cause illnesses in humans. Transporting some materials have sometimes caused spills, most notably oil spills. These oil spills result in contaminated oceans and harm to plant and animal life in those oceans. Every time a new reserve is found, humans exploit the area and cause some form of environmental harm.

The current sustainability plan, in theory, is a very good one. According to the plans in place now, we will still eventually run out of resources, but if the theories introduced in the plan are followed by a majority, they will run out later, rather than sooner (Pezzey, 2004). The only problem with the current plans in place to protect and sustain our resources is that it is not aggressive enough. There are not enough celebrities and other important political figures involved in educating Americans in a society that is influenced greatly by the media. The plans are basically suggestions to citizens that they should implement into their daily lives, rather than being regulations or laws they are expected to follow with consequences for breaking these laws. Although educating people on the negative