We can’t escape hearing about it: climate change, global warming, and the energy crisis!
So what’s the problem?
Well, we currently live in an energy-guzzling society. In fact, we use so much energy that it’s like having almost 150 slaves working for us 24 hours a day, every single day. That’s how many slaves a rich Roman emperor would have had thousands of years ago!
More information on energy slaves here.
Prefer to work in numbers? A few years ago it was released that we were using energy at a rate of 15 TW worldwide (TW = ‘Terawatt’).
That’s 15,000,000,000,000 Watts, or 15,000,000,000,000 Joules of energy every second.
Wow. That’s A LOT of energy.
It is! And that’s not all. The population of the world is getting bigger and bigger. The United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) has estimated that there could be almost 9 billion people in the world by 2050. More people means more energy consumption.
Why is that a bad thing?
At the moment, most of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels, which presents us with a few problems. Ever heard of global warming or climate change?
We need to find a way to give us this extra power in an environmentally-friendly way or reduce the amount of energy we use. Check out the pages below for more information!