What are some of the problems with using fossil fuels for energy?

Question

What are some of the problems with using fossil fuels for energy?

Answer 1

Fossil fuels are made up of Fossils. Fossils are dinosaur bones. However, dinosaurs do not live anymore. Furthermore, and in conclusion, we need more fossil fuels, in the form of Dinosaurs.

Answer 2

War in the mideast

Extremely polluting

Even transporting them is polluting

spending all our money on oil in countries we don't get along with so well

It is running out

Answer 3

They can be difficult to recover from the earth.

They usually require quite a bit of processing to be useful.

When combusted to release the energy, they typically give off byproducts that can be harmful to the environment and to people exposed to them.

They are currently accepted to be a finite resource; however, when they will run out is unknown.

Their removal from the earth could lead to part of the surface to fall into the resulting holes leading to a great loss of life.

Take the last one with more than a grain of salt.

Answer 4

Limited supply from politically or environmentally senstive areas. eg central asia & Alaska, Irish peat bogs

Leaks & spills, eg Nigeria & exxon Valdez; & gas flares

Mountain topping destruction of the Appalachians http://youtube.com/watch?v=1jGqwQm0jJo

refining, uses a lot of energy & dangerous processes. easy to refine sources have mostly been used.



Benzine off-gassing from filling stations; & light pollution from forecourts & signs

Particulates from incomplete combustions (thousand premature deaths a year in London alone)

Nox & SOx acidic - bad for buildings & respiration, & forests & lakes

Centralised power in a few corpororations,

political pressure/bribes & support for dictatorships eg http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/...

Noise of infernal combustion; generators; tankers...

Answer 5

Uses up or resources and we must rely in foreign countries which charge astronomical prices. We need

Natural resources, we need to cut back on the consumption

Answer 6

These fuels will eventually be used up and they take a long time to come about.

Answer 7

Having fossil fuels run out is partly bad, partly good.

If we run out of them, we stop polluting the world with them, and in particular  we stop creating a very significant Greenhouse gas, CO2, that contributes to global warming.

But we may pollute just as much with replacements, we have yet to run our economy entirely on Nuclear, wind, and solar power, so we may not have adequately assessed that.

Combustion of fossil fuels provides plants with extra CO2 to use for growth. This is only partly good. Part of the effect of this is that those plants MUST have the extra water needed to convert that CO2 to sugar, starch, oil, and proteins. Which is OK if there is enough water, but will exacerbate a drought.

Carbon dioxide dissolves into the oceans, and in due time is sequestered on the ocean floor. Well and good, but if too much is in the ocean, because we are putting it in faster than it settles out, we get chemical changes called acidification, which make life precarious for many animals in the oceans.

Carbon dioxide feeding large growths of plants even creates dead zones in the oceans, large zones in which no animal life survives because decomposing plant life uses up all the oxygen from the water. Increasing the CO2 over the oceans increases the tonnage of CO2 in those plants that will have to be decomposed.