Energy Conservation

Energy Conservation

Jennifer Clark

University of Phoenix

Have you ever really sat down and considered the amount of energy you use each and every day? Would you be comfortable revealing this figure to an environmentalist? I decided I might be a little bit surprised with my own results so I tried to determine just how much energy I may consume on a daily basis. I started by looking around me at the energy I was currently using. What I found was an excessive amount of unnecessary waste occurring right in my own house. I took it one step further and evaluated the way I go through my work day and found even more energy being pointlessly overused by myself and many of the people I work with. I chose to make a change to attempt to avoid overusing energy. While I was devising my plan, I learned some pretty amazing things.

Our largest energy consumer is our homes, with industry and motor vehicles in a close second. While some statistics show that human energy consumption has been reduced in the last thirty years, the same statistics also tell us that it is not because of the way we are living; rather the amount of energy used has been lowered by advances in technology. A good example would be light bulbs. In 1879, the most commonly used light bulb in homes only converted ten percent of their energy into light and the other ninety into heat. Today’s fluorescent bulbs convert one hundred percent of the energy into heat (The Need Project, 2007). At the rate humans are consuming energy, we are in danger of losing some of the great resources we all count on to make our lives comfortable. New and improved appliances, vehicles, machines and other technology is helping the problem, but in order to sustain we need a long term solution. Since ninety percent of the world’s energy is coming from fossil fuels, we are going to have to get drastic (Energy Saving Now!, 2007).

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