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Showing posts from December, 2012

Scope of analysis

Awareness of boundary issues and scope of analysis is essential in critical thinking. Let’s take a look at energy. We tend to bucket energy sources in buckets like renewable, fossil fuels and nuclear, but what does that really mean? On the face of it fossil fuels and energy sources like solar, wind and hydro have nothing in common and are seem contradictory.   Solar energy obviously is energy captured from the sun and as wind is also a phenomena caused by solar heat it too is a solar derivative.   With respect to hydro, the sun heats water which, with the help of wind evaporates, forms clouds and then rains down in mountains where we can use the water to run turbines and capture kinetic energy. Therefore hydro is also a solar derivative. Fossil fuels are the product of organic remnants of primarily plants which lived a long time ago, died and were transformed under heat and pressure into various forms of fuels like coal, oil and natural gas. Those source plants however wer