Renewable EnergyRenewable Energy Sources are those that won’t run out. For example, the sun will continue to shine for the next 5 billion years or so and while it does so, the winds on our planet will keep on blowing. The energy they provide will remain with us whether we use them or not and they are free! Added to that, this free energy causes no pollution. It does seem sensible to make use of them! Non Renewable Energy - Fossil Fuels
Fossil fuels are essentially a non-renewable energy source and include oil, gas and coal. The geological processes which created them took millions of years, so they cannot be replaced within human timescales. Once they’ve gone, they really have gone! When we burn these fossil fuels we also release the carbon that has been stored out of harms way for millennia and this has a hugely adverse effect on Global Warming.
It’s impossible to estimate when fossil fuels will be used up, but within the next 100 years it is widely believed that the cost of finding and extracting new deposits will render them too expensive for everyday use. For oil, the timescale is thought to be within 40 years. The timescales we have for addressing the problems of Global Warming are even shorter than that. This doesn’t seem much of a legacy to pass onto our descendants and it doesn’t give us or them very long to get things sorted out. |