Dear President,

Right now, fossil fuels and nonrenewable resources rule the world. Almost everything you see uses nonrenewable energy to work. What will happen when we run out of fossil fuels? How will we survive? Many of these questions go unanswered, but there is one solution we can get started on, and that is replacing our use of non-renewable energy with alternative energy.

First of all, let's talk about Non-Renewable energy. As most of you hopefully know, it is not the safest or cleanest source of energy that we can use, but sadly Fossil Fuels are currently the world's primary energy source, even though they are finite resources and harm the environment.

When we use fossil fuels, they let off harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which could lead to potentially catastrophic changes in the earth’s climate like global warming and disruption to the weather patterns all over the world. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the burning of fossil fuels was responsible for 79% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. But other, cleaner solutions exist: energy efficiency and renewable energy. If we use alternative energy sources, we can decrease the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, helping the environment in becoming a clean, pure place again.

Another problem concerning fossil fuels is energy security. The pace of world oil discoveries has been declining since 1964. Oilfields found during the past decade have tended to be smaller, on average, than those located decades earlier, and tend to

require expensive new technologies (including horizontal drilling, deep-water drilling, and hydro fracturing) for their development. If we still depend fully on those decreasing resources until they run out, we will be left with nothing to fuel our economy with, which would mean another great depression and a world with no energy. Obviously, we need to decrease our dependency on fossil fuels, which we can do by using alternative energy.  By using renewable energy sources like solar energy, we reduce our dependence on fossil fuel gas and oil reserves, which are becoming more expensive and difficult to find as well as our dependence on imported fossil fuels, improving our energy security. If we use alternative energy sources, it would matter less if oil, gas or coal ran out or not.

But, of course, some people do not agree with using alternative energy. Some things that they have pointed out are that renewable energy relies heavily upon the weather for sources of supply: rain, wind, and sunshine. It may be difficult the generate the necessary energy due to the unpredictable weather patterns. Another disadvantage of renewable energy that people talk about is that it is difficult to generate large amount of energy as those produced by coal powered plants. Also, To meet up with the large quantities of electricity produced by fossil fuels, large amount of solar panels and wind farms need to be set up. With that in mind, we still need to remember that using alternative energy would would improve people's health, the air would become cleaner, and global patterns around the world would slowly shift back to their normal state. Don't you think that working a bit harder and spending a bit more money for alternative energy would be worth saving the environment and saving the USA from a huge crash in energy and fuel?

In all, there are a plethora of reasons of why we should start using and harnessing more alternative energy. Fossil fuels are nonrenewable, that is, they draw on finite resources that will eventually dwindle, becoming too expensive or too environmentally damaging to retrieve. In contrast, the many types of renewable energy resources-such as wind and solar energy-are constantly replenished and will never run out. Their fuel being derived from natural and available resources reduces the costs of operation. Even more importantly, renewable energy produces little or no waste products such as carbon dioxide or other chemical pollutants, so has minimal impact on the environment.

Have you ever dreamed of saving the world? A good place to start would be by using alternative energy instead of non-renewable energy.

                                                                                              Sincerely,

                                                                                         AnaSofia Sloane