Environmental Aspects Of Energy Use

The major causes for environmental degradation in the industrialized countries, mainly during the post-World War II period. There drastic changes in the technology of industrial production, agricultural and transportation, made up possible by the accessibility of cheap energy, particularly, cheap oil. In most situations, the new, more polluting methodologies have also been more energy-ineffective than those they substituted, though were more gainful since they used cheap energy.

The ecological disaster has been blamed on various things by various groups in the west: Exploding populations, mainly in the under-developed countries; prosperity and wastefulness, mainly in the developed countries; profits; man’s innate fierceness; technology; and so on. In order to survive on the earth, human beings need the stable, ongoing existence of a suitable environment that encompasses a thin skin of water, air, and soil.

Barry Commoner stated four Laws of Ecology which highlight the scope of this science of planetary housekeeping as follows:

I Law: Everything is associated to Everything Else:

The ecosystem contains multiple interconnected portions that interact with each other. The feedback characteristic of ecosystem outcomes in amplifications and strengthening of numerous procedures.  

II Law: Everything should go somewhere:

In nature there is no such thing as “waste”. In each and every natural system, what is excreted by one individual as waste is taken up as food by the other. Nothing can be predictable to “go away”  

III Law: Nature knows best:

Modern technology plans to “improve on nature”. This law holds, though, that any main man-made change in a natural system is probable to be harmful to that system.

IV Law: There is no such thing as a free lunch:  

In ecology, as in economics, this law is planned to warn that every profit is won at some cost. In a manner, this law embodies the prior three laws. Since the global system is a associated entire, anything extracted from it by human attempt should be paid for; payment of the price can’t be avoided, it can be evaded, it can only be postponed.