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Choosing your energy sources, choosing your future

Yves Martin
Expert

In what way are world energy consumption habits not "sustainable"?

As their name suggests, fossil fuels — oil, natural gas and coal — are not renewable. And oil, the only energy practical for transportation, will not survive beyond the 21st century, though transportation will have shaped our cities and regional planning in ways that will be tough to reverse. Carbon dioxide, the waste product of fossil fuels, triggers a cumulative change in our atmosphere that can only be halted by cutting emissions in half. Nuclear power also has a waste problem, but unlike carbon dioxide, which we lose control of as soon as it's emitted, we can continue to guard nuclear waste. This basically positive factor may backfire on us if we cannot lay the groundwork for social acceptance of nuclear waste storage sites.