Johannes+Oral

Here is my speech
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Here is a written version:
It is the black stuff we get out of the ground in places like the west coast. It is getting used at a rate of 1686 metric tonnes a second. That’s just over 42 truck and trailer loads. The stuff I am talking about is coal. It gets used for power stations like the one in Huntly or for smelting iron in china. Even though this seems like a lot of coal it is, comparatively, little for the 6.5 billion people living on the world. Imagine the amount used if everybody lived like we live here in New Zealand. When coal is burned it emits tonnes of carbon dioxide along with a cocktail of heavy metals like mercury. The world also only has about 400 years of coal left in it but if we keep using it like we are now that is way too much. That is what I am going to talk to you about. The use of coal and the fact that I think we are using it in the wrong way as we are thinking about the energy we get out of it but not the consequences that are starting to affect us now.

First of all coal has a huge impact on the environment as the way we use it now is not sustainable because of the way we use it. We could without much investment convert all coal power stations to clean coal and then use them for the remaining 400 years while we slowly take them out of service and replace them with wind farms so we don’t have to replace them all in a space of ten years or less. Replacing them all in ten years would mean a huge investment in short time and for developing countries like India it would be a near impossible task. Also wind alone cannot provide all our energy so we would have geothermal, solar, hydropower and nuclear power available for use as well. The problem with nuclear however is the radioactive waste it produces, hydropower stations are already very widely used and don’t have much room for expansion. This leaves us with geothermal generation and solar power. Nothing much is wrong with solar power but at the state solar panels are at now they are very inefficient and if we had even 50 years more time solar power would be a lot more feasible. Geothermal energy is a very abundant resource just like the suns light but the only difference is that we have to drill many wells into the earths crust to get the superheated water for energy generation.

People are suggesting that we build more coal power stations but we know that coal is exhaustible and in the US the production of coal is likely to peak in about 40-50 years. That means that in 40-50 years the production of coal in the US will not get any greater but instead the production will slowly get less and less. So why are people suggesting that we invest more in coal when we know that it will not do our environment any good and when we know that it will run out in 300 years and we will then have to close the coal power stations then anyway?

Coal also releases traces of uranium when it burns which can theoretically be captured and made into nuclear weapons by countries or people who don’t have them yet. This is a huge security risk for all countries in this world if someone like the Taliban gets a nuclear weapon.

While there are also many positives to coal like the fact that it is cheap compared to other energy sources and that it is very easily transportable. But I think that the bad points of coal far out weigh the good points and as said before the main problem with coal at the moment, which affects for all fossil fuels, is the fact that they cause global warming and are hard to extract from the ground.

My Reflection: I think that this speech was very informative and reasonably persuasive, but I also think that it was not very entertaining and quite boring.