• Question: what will happen when we eventuly run out of unsubstainable energy resources?

    Asked by pigsflyoverthemoon to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Hi pigsflyoverthemoon,

      When we run out of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) and Uranium for nuclear power stations, we won’t be able to use them, however we are and will have developed the renewable energies and along with improvements to the efficiency of energy using devices and our homes we will also use less energy and we will be able to get by.

      It is a great question though and there have been lots of debates about this recently especially after the issues that arose at the Fukoshima nuclear plant after the Japan earthquake caused people to be concerned about the safety of nucelar power, leaving quesions about where our non-fossil fuel energy would come from if we didn’t want to use nuclear power and haven’t got the renewable energy systems really set up yet.

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 1 Jul 2012:

      Hi pigsfly,

      When we run out of resources like coal and oil, I really hope that we’ve developed enough alternatives, like wind and solar, or nuclear fusion, to provide the energy we all need. We have enough coal left for several hundreds of years of consumption. We used to think oil would run out soon, but in the last 10 years huge discoveries in shale formations (called shale gas and shale oil – you may have heard these terms on the news) mean that we probably have enough oil and gas to last 100s of years as well.

      I think the bigger problem is not that we’ll run out of coal, oil and gas, but that we have too much! If we carry on burning all of the reserves that we have, we will cause a huge amount of climate change, that will have huge consequences for us and the planet. If we are to stand a chance of avoiding this, we need to switch to renewable energy as soon as possible, long before we actually run out of gas/oil/coal.

      As the saying goes – the stone-age didn’t end because we ran out of stone. It ended because we found better things to use (iron and bronze). So the oil-age won’t end because we run out of oil. It will end because we find something better (probably either renewables or fusion).

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