NRES 102 Assignment 3

NRES 102 Assignment 3
Renewable energy sources are vital to the survival of our population as well as saving the environment. Fossil Fuels are going to run out, it is inevitable, so more needs to be done to increase the utilization of renewable energy. One of our main sources of energy is oil. There is only a finite amount though, and even though we only started using it around the 1900s, it will all be gone around 2100. This gives us time to learn more about renewable sources, but in the end the clock is ticking.
Student 1 was a sophomore male general engineer who is from a rural part in Illinois. He does support the growth of renewable energy sources. While he does think that a switch from fossil fuels would be good, he does not believe that it is that realistic or economically viable. He was not aware that our campus is trying to be greener by using renewable resources. He did believe that the government should take more action, since it will be hard to get people to change their ways.
Student 2 was a freshman male political science major from a suburban background. He also believed that renewable resources would be the best option. He thinks that it would be an economically viable option at this point in time and was aware of some of the things we are doing on campus. He did not think that the government should have to get involved by adding policies.
Student 3 was a sophomore female nursing major from the northern suburbs of Illinois. Once again, she thought that renewable resources would be much better than fossil fuels if we could find a more economically feasible way of implementing them. She was aware of a few things we were doing on campus, but only knew of a couple examples. She also did not believe that more government policies were the way to go.
Student 4 was a junior male education major from an urban location. Like everyone else, he did think that finding a renewable alternative to the fossils fuels would be a great solution to our global problem. He believed that if done right, we could find a way to use and come up with this alternative in the current economy. He was aware of many of the different ways the campus was trying to use more renewable sources, and he thought that government policies could be a good idea as long as they were not too aggressive.
Student 5 was a junior female accounting major from the suburbs. She too believed that renewable resources would be a step in the right direction, but did not think that right now it was very realistic to be able to do away with fossil fuels. She knew of a good amount of things that had been done on campus. As for more government policies, similar to student 1, she thought that government policies would be the only way to get people to change.
As far as moving to renewable energy, all of the students that I interviewed would be for it. This wasn’t that surprising to me, because we all know that fossil fuels will not last and they have harmful effects on the environment. There didn’t seem to be any variation among the answers based on where anyone was from, and their majors were all too different to see a correlation there. I was surprised at how split people were on government policies being put in place to promote the switch to renewable sources. It is difficult to think of what I would do to convince these students of anything. However, if I were to try and convince someone about why we should have more government policies about the matter, I would show them examples from the past. These examples would show how changes in government policies have helped to make substantial changes in our society. I would express that since they already believe that a change needs to be made, that this is the only way to start making it.