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...