Road to Sustainability

Jason Chu

Mr. Dickson

Global Perspectives

February 19th, 2014

Renewable Energy Deployment: Time to Reinforce Success

The world's rapidly growing population and rising socioeconomic levels have resulted in the

depletion of natural resources. With these unintended consequences, the idea of sustainability has

emerged as the concept of balancing the world's environmental, social equality and economic

demands. Sustainability has become a popular topic of discussion for people all over the world,

given the rising environmental concerns of the increasingly sophisticated public. Out of these three

dimensions, the environmental aspect is especially essential to sustainability, since everything we

need to survive depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. So, in my

opinion, sustainability should be in the context of our environment, and can be defined as the the

maintenance of circumstances in which humans and nature can coexist without jeopardizing the

needs of future generations.

Historically, the burning of fossil fuels, such as wood, coal, oil, and natural gas, has been a

significant contributor to the decimating of the earth's natural resources. The idea of sustainability

was brought up in response to concerns regarding the negative aspects of fossil fuels. It introduces

renewable energy sources. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, fossil fuels

meet around 82% of U.S. energy demand. And the other 18% of the demand is made up of all types

of renewable energy sources. There are countless types of renewable energy sources, but these

industries still have not taken off to achieve the goal of the global change of transitioning from

fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Renewable energy has become one of the main pillars of

sustainability, not only because fossil fuels are a limited resource, but also because of the pollution

that they introduce into our environment. The continued use of fossil fuels to...