Renewable Energy: Peak Oil
| This entry is part of a series about renewable energy. It’ll be a renewable week!
This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3) |
|
 |
|
If you own a car, you need to put gas—short for ‘gasoline’—in it. That gas is made from oil, which we pump out of the ground. Oil is a finite resource, that means, there is a certain amount of oil in the ground—I don’t think anybody knows how much that is—and one day, it will run out. ‘Finite’ is a word that means ‘limited.’
Your time is finite, so I’ll move on to the next piece of vocabulary.
Now, more oil is pumped out of the ground every year. But, because oil is a finite resource, we can’t pump more oil every year forever. When we start getting less oil every year, people say we will reach what is called ‘Peak Oil.’ Peak oil is the term for the moment when we go from always getting more oil out of the ground to always getting less oil out of the ground.
It’s fair to say that, when we reach peak oil, a lot of things in our life will change.
What do you think will change in your life? Do you think we will reach peak oil in your lifetime? Are you doing anything to make sure you can live independent of oil?
