Criminal Justice
Topic:
Global Energy Crisis
Analyzing the Global Energy Crisis Through the Lenses of the Natural and Applied Sciences and the Social Sciences
The natural and applied sciences lens on the global energy crisis provides a unique perspective in which one determines how energy has been used in the world until it becomes a worldwide challenge. Human beings have for the longest time relied on carbonaceous fuels to survive through different times. The industrial revolution that brought in both technological and economic developments brought a major shift in energy sources with the usage of coal, mainly for steam engines, but increasingly for power plants (Coyle & Simmons, 2014). The use of thermal energy in the 19th century for generating mechanical energy would be the primary driver to the transformations. Overtime, this revolution went to the incorporation of petroleum, natural gas among other fossil fuels to drive steam and electrical engines. Subsequently, it became possible for greater amounts of production energy to be available to humans. However, human beings would have an increased urge to fully exploit fossil fuels without a consideration of their depletion. Additionally, there would be an increased scientific awareness in the earth’s atmosphere and the acknowledgement of the delicate balance existing between constituent elements. Thus, within no time, the global economy would face a disruption in the availability and supply of the energy resources compared to the increased demand for the energy. This disruption also arises from the fact that stakeholders are calling for the use of cleaner energy options to stop the environmental degradation caused by the long overdue use of carbonaceous fuels.
Social sciences is another educational lens important in the analysis of the global energy crisis. The social science perspective acknowledges the fact that the global energy crisis is also a result of non-economic barriers thwarting the early adoption of the economically and environmentally friendly energy options. This perspective ensures that the right interventions will be implemented to eliminate the barriers. According to Sovacool et al. (2015), consumers have rationally been declining to adopt the different set of more efficient technologies due to several reasons including the lack of terminology clarity to the extensive distrust they have towards corporate and government claims to the default purchasing behaviors. It is only recently that more activists have put more efforts to try and change the social-behaviors of consumers to have them geared towards taking the more energy -efficient options. However, there is still more consumption of the unfriendly energy options which continues to propagate the energy crisis. Social science researchers have the potential of translating the relative advantage of demonstrating the need for individual and organization decision-makers to make decisions focussed on mitigating the global energy crisis.
References
Coyle, E. D., & Simmons, R. A. (2014). Understanding the global energy crisis. Purdue University Press.
Sovacool, B. K., Ryan, S. E., Stern, P. C., Janda, K., Rochlin, G., Spreng, D., … & Lutzenhiser, L. (2015). Integrating social science in energy research. Energy Research & Social Science, 6, 95-99.
