It is common knowledge that other alternatives besides natural resources can be used to provide power for our hungry planet. The three major sourc

es of energy in the world today are coal, oil, and natural gas. The future holds many opportunities for power sources but the most popular are solar power, nuclear power, cold-fusion, and geothermal power. Solar power is widely appreciated as the cleanest source of energy available today but because of its expensive photocells needed to produce a usable energy source it is thought to be not worth the effort of energy conversion for consumption. Nuclear power on the other hand is widely used today and will continue to be a big supplier of energy in the future but it comes at great cost to the environment and people because it produces hazardous chemical byproducts. You can store hazardous chemicals in only so many places before it becomes a big environmental problem. Cold-fusion (room-temperature fusion) involves the complicated process of turning dense water (2H2O or D2O) into a cheap, clean, and abundant power source. It is said to be limitless in its ability to produce energy for an ever-expanding population on Earth. It is foreseeable in the future that cold-fusion would be used as a major power source but some scientists believe that it could take as long as half a century or more before it would become economically and scientifically feasible. Geothermal energy is based off of the fact that the Earth's crust becomes hotter with increasing depth. This means that enormous quantities of heat are available as a resource for possible use. Geothermal industry today uses hot aquifers or natural flowing zones for production of energy, but these resources are very limited compared with the huge amount of energy stored in the large volume of deep crystalline basement rocks which have high temperatures but very limited water resources. We are slowly learning how to exploit these hot rocks in order to gain access to this environmentally friendly and valuable resource. The approach is to use the natural fractures in the deep rock as a giant heat exchanger but experimentation into power for the masses has slowed considerably and thus makes the idea of having your home powered by a deep hole in the ground a far off possibility.

Beyond animal extinction and displacement companies and businesses produce pollution beyond belief. The pollution produced by industry increases every day. "Twenty-seven years after the first oil embargo, fourteen years after Chernobyl, eight years after the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and three years after the Kyoto Climate Conference, we have made little progress. Despite huge improvements in the energy in the energy efficiency of lights, appliances, buildings, industrial processes, etc., per capita energy consumption in the United States is now back within two percent of the peak in 1973, before the first oil embargo" (Hayes 7).

So, we are left asking ourselves why don't we just switch to earth friendly power sources, stop the pollution, killing of endangered species, and intrusi

Some common words found in the essay are:
, Sherry Rowland, Protection Agency, Goldenrod Don't, Climate Conference, President Bush, II CFCs, North Carolina, global warming, endangered species, protected lands, acid rain, Summit Rio, oil companies, natural resources, Spruce-fir Moss, levels monsoons droughts, displacement extinction, rising sea, sea levels, wildlife displacement extinction, oil embargo, sea levels monsoons, droughts hurricanes forest, monsoons droughts hurricanes,
Approximate Word count = 1983
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)