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What is the single most important subject, that this generation of the worlds mothers and fathers, should be teaching their children about?
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But energy is no more a right today than it was in the past when our ancestors had to scrounge for firewood in the forest or pull their own ploughs. Just because we've enjoyed cheap energy for the last 50 years - the time of the Oil Age, which is fast running down - does not mean that it's guaranteed forever. Indeed, today we've reached a turning point.
Only if we are informed of the ways that energy is connected to the economy and to the environment can we make the difficult tradeoffs necessary to protect our way of life and the natural systems that sustain life on earth.
Can't live with it, can't live without it.
“The only thing worse than running out of oil," says Charles Hall, professor of systems ecology at SUNY-Syracuse, "is not running out of oil." Oil is the lifeblood of industrial civilization, and 97 percent of all transportation relies on oil, with scarce viable substitute on the horizon. But burning oil and other fossil fuels creates more dangerous global-warming gasses than any other human activity.
Will peak oil save us from global warming? That is, will running out of cheap oil slow down the rate at which humans release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere? Probably not. Left to their own devices and without government regulation of carbon emissions, simple economics of supply and demand will encourage us to replace cheap oil with the easiest affordable energy source. In America's case, this is coal, of which the U.S. is said to have a 250-year supply at current usage rates.
The industry is already working on ways to profitably liquefy coal to replace gasoline, diesel and even jet fuel. And that's bad news for the environment, since coal is much dirtier than oil, even burned using today's technology. And today's way of mining coal, through aggressive strip mining and mountaintop removal, is actually more destructive to the environment than the deep mining of the past.
As to tomorrow's technology of clean coal, so far it's nothing more than speculation from an industry with little history of doing anything safely or cleanly. Lets not return to it.
Become energy literate now for a better future
"In the larger scheme of things, it's a matter of survival to learn about energy," says Kevin Coyle, who now serves as vice president of education with the National Wildlife Foundation in Reston. "In the immediate term, all of our lives will be better if we are aware of energy used, energy spent, global warming and a variety of other key issues."