grqb's Journal: The Importance of energy in our lives

Check out theWatt.com for more energy discussion.

Energy is pretty important to the quality of our lives. Just to give you a sense of how important energy really is, the BBC was interviewing somebody from Iraq a couple of weeks ago and he could have been complaining about the kidnapings, the shootings, the corruption, but he was complaining about the fact that he only had electricity for a couple of hours a day. And imagine if you didn't have electricity, what would you do? You wouldn't be able to read slashdot, that's for sure. You wouldn't be able to have a shower or flush the toilet. If we didn't have enough electricity, we wouldn't be able to build or run hospitals. Basically, the difference between the developed world and the undeveloped world is that the developed world has energy and the un-developed world has no electricity. A person in Africa has only 500 watts of power on average. My girlfriends hairdryer alone uses 1000 watts of power.

An abundant and uninterrupted supply of energy is what allows our economies to grow, it's what allows people to have jobs, earn money, send their kids to school so that their kids can live a happy life and increase their standard of living. We're at a point now where our standard of living will have to change very soon because we just don't have enough energy to maintain our current rate of growth. This is why it is important for everybody to start conserving energy. If you want your children and their children to have a better life than you did, everybody has to stop wasting energy today. It's easy to do, just turn off your lights at home, dry your clothes outside instead of in the clothes dryer, try not to drive so much when you could be walking or biking and try to buy food that wasn't grown halfway across the world. Simple things done today will go a long way to ensuring a good future for you and your children.