Staff editorials
2011
The 2011 Powering a Nation staff has spent the last 10 weeks developing a project that shows the complexities of our relationship with coal. We hope that you will see how coal powers our lives and get a sense of what that means for people on different sides of the issue.
2010
Ten weeks of reporting and research have resulted in the UNC News21 team understanding U.S. energy needs to undergo sea change. Industry, government and consumers must redefine their roles, actions and relationships with one another to deliver us from the fossil fuel era.
Why we should care about energy
Our use of energy over the past 100 years has transformed our global economy and made our lives more comfortable and productive. We have become better at extracting energy resources and more efficient in using that energy. As a general rule, we have flourished.
But we have lost sight of the basic cyclical requirements of living on a planet. Just as though we live on a spaceship, we have to be cautious in how we use and reuse our supplies. We only have one planet, and presently we are using the resources as if there is an extra planet in the closet. I looked and it’s not there!
Nature is a strict and wonderful teacher, yet many of us are not listening or learning. In 1993, Paul Hawken wrote, “every day, the worldwide economy burns an amount of energy the planet required 10,000 days (27 years) to create.” What are we thinking?
It is imperative for our survival that we not only realize that we live on a planet, but that we start acting like we live on a planet. As with our recent economic lessons, we are quickly moving toward a potentially painful environmental lesson.The true solution to the problems of our energy gluttony lies with all of us. Every decision we make should be measured against the standard of realistic planetary living. We are seven billion strong, and good, sustainable actions can turn this around.
It is as easy as turning off a switch, making an informed purchasing decision or looking past today toward the future. My home is more comfortable and easier to maintain than it was 18 years ago, yet my energy usage is lower—a lot lower. Even with rising energy prices, my power bills are lower—freeing more money to invest in efficiency.
I care about energy because it is critical to the economic growth and technological advances that make most of us comfortable. But our overuse of energy is threatening our existence.
The fossil resources that formed over millions of years are finite. It is time to awaken, to embrace efficiency as the new status symbol and to aggressively seek wind, solar, hydrokinetic, geothermal and other forms of renewable energy as the future for our precious and rare planet.
Danny Orlando is the ENERGY STAR regional program manager of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, southeastern region.