Energy Use Essay

Submitted By Ronack
Words: 572
Pages: 3

Energy use
Global Issue:
Why energy use is a problem:
Energy use isn’t just some far off thing that affects nobody, in fact, it affects most people’s everyday lives. Many issues arise from the use of energy: greenhouse gas emissions, acid rain, climate change, and dependency on depleting supplies of fossil fuels— especially from politically unstable regions of the world. It also increases land pollution when renewable energy isn’t used as well as water and atmospheric pollution. 1
It’s actually not really the energy use that’s the problem, it’s the way we harvest it. On one end, petroleum is a non-renewable energy source that isn’t particularly environmentally friendly either, but on the other hand, there’s hydro-electric power, tidal energy, wave power, biomass, wind energy and solar energy which are both renewable and environmentally friendly 2
Statistics:
Actually, energy usage is also not a bad thing if we use it in minimal amounts, but research has shown that this is not the case, even though we (Australia) have been improving slightly over the last few years. As you can see, in 2001-02, the amount of energy used was 175 000 GW per hour, that figure had increased to 200 000 GW per hour in 2007-08 which is when energy use peaked. In that year, we used around 80% of our energy from coal which is a non-renewable energy source. After that, we can see a definite downhill slope that tells us Australia is not-only using less energy overall, but is also using a much smaller amount of coal, the same amount of natural gas used and larger amounts of hydro-electricity and wind energy used.
Why are we doing about are current situation:
As you can see, we have been using declining amounts of energy since 2007-08, but how? Mostly because most of our appliances have become way more energy efficient than before. As we are mainly depending on our appliances for most of our work, this makes a huge difference.

Case Study 1:
What I chose:
I chose the coal mining industry in Australia for my case study in energy.
Spatial dimension:
Well obviously this take part Australia, but the particular parts of Australia produce lots of coal. The part of Australia that produces the most coal is