The Need for Change: Our Looming Energy Crisis

The world's population is growing at an alarming g rate. By 2006, official statistics put the World population at 6.2 billion people. Now, that is a drop compared to the near 500 million people who inhabited the same planet some 100 or so years ago. Still world population is growing at an average of 15 million people per day.

With the boom in human population, demands on the earth's resources have likewise exploded, particularly in terms of energy and food consumption. While both are important issues, which need urgent addressing by authorities, the former is proving to be really a thorn in a world increasingly dependent on a single source of energy. Currently, as it stands, most machines in the world are driven by fossil fuels like oil and gas. With an energy consumption explosion being experienced world over and people ever adopting energy intensive lifestyles, a big energy crisis is in the offing.

Big economies like U.S, Russia, the E.U and recently China and India account for almost two thirds of the world's oil needs. Their per capita consumption of energy far outstrips the rest of the world. We are too dependent on oil that if it was to run out even for one day the whole world will ground to a halt.

This has led to some industry players and governments appealing for formulation of joint strategies to counter the ever-growing need for oil and avert a possible crisis when the reserves run low. Chevron one of the biggest oil companies has run ads warning the U.S on its vulnerability when it comes to the energy crisis. The U.S has about 3% of the world's oil resources while Russia and the Middle East have well close to 60%.

They further warn that the era of cheap oil is over which, by the way, should be a concern for any citizen of the earth. Of course running down the current reserves would take quite some time but that's not reason enough to sit pretty and wait for it to happen. Every country has interests which run past the next hundred years.