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The Risk Our Society Takes by Depending on the Use of Fossil Fuels

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The Risk Our Society Takes by Depending on the Use of Fossil Fuels
What most people in our society lack to notice is how our country 's continuous use of fossil fuels is endangering to nature and the wildlife it inhabits as well as the environment that we live in. Our society seems to think that fossil fuels we use in excess today will last forever but actuality will one day be depleted to unrepairable measures, which is why we need a cleaner more environmentally friendly substitute. With that said my paper is going to underline how our society would be able to transfer from fossil fuels to cleaner energies which are beneficial to our earth and existence. There is a great understandable hunger for energy in the world. Increases uses of energy are strongly correlated with the gross domestic product (fossil fuels); though if the principal sources of energy are fossil fuels. Then we are faced with a dilemma; burning the fuels contributes to the greenhouse effect and thus to the warming of the Earth, causing some serious environmental consequences. While there are many forms of energy we are familiar with: mechanical, chemical, nuclear, light, thermal energy, heat, just to name a few and there are many sources for all forms of energy but people found it more convenient to exploit a relative few which would be fossil fuels. The burning of fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) provides the United States with about 90 percent of the energy we use. Before the use of fossil fuels, population created an increase in uses for wood as there main source of energy. This caused the rate of wood 's use to out strip its rate of growth, with the consequent of forests. A larger part of Europe and the United States have been deforested as a result of this. The most serious indictment of fossil fuels is the harm they do to the environment. Carbon Dioxide along the sulfur, nitrogen, compounds, and other hydrocarbons, some of which are carcinogenic (cancer causing) are incorporated into these fuels. When the fuels are burned these


Cited: Borowitz, Sidney. Farewell fossil fuels: reviewing America 's energy policy. New York: Plenum, 1998. Kidd, J. S., and Renee A. Kidd. " 'Clean Energy '." Air Pollution, Science and Society. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005. Facts On File, Inc. Science Online. . 11/22/06 Roberts, Paul. The end of Oil: on the edge of a perilous new world. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Moore, Curtis, and Alan Miller. Green gold: Japan, Germany, the United States, and the race for environmental technology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

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