Turn Up the Heat!

                One of the more well-known laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics states that then amount of entropy in a system will continuously increase in value. In English, it just means that energy or heat in a system will become more disordered which means that heat turns into a worse, more unusable form. However, London has found a way to reuse this energy by collecting the smoke from the heat and uses it to turn a fan which generates kinetic energy and reduces the amount of energy wasted. This is an important outlet to look at because carbon emissions are destroying the environment and this could reduce the overall carbon emissions, and increase the duration for how long we can stall out on renewable resources before these fossil fuel stores become exhausted.

                Although this method is viable to do in London, it would be almost out of the question in America, because London’s distribution of energy is in a smaller scale than the United States. The degraded energy has a very small service area and since the United States is clearly much larger than London and even Britain, so it would be difficult to provide the same amount of energy. Although if America was to have smaller much more centralized systems of power, it would be more environmentally friendly, but yet again, this is impossible. Many of America’s systems are the same. What I mean by that is that the products are tightly controlled by a couple companies, as demonstrated in Food Inc., and to split these companies up, as some presidents did, would cause a decrease in revenue and so would destroy the economy, but save the environment, and still, think about which is more important?

                This increases the efficiency of the electricity and energy, but makes one wonder, how would this decrease the overall carbon emissions? With an increase in the productivity, we would not use up as much coal or fossil fuels year to year and so to provide the same amount of electricity there is not as large of a need for the same amount of coal. Thus if not as much coal is used, then there is less of an output. One problem I see with this is that once the heat is used up again, it turns into a much more useless version of the once previously thought useless heat. This may or may not have adverse effects too, because sometimes humans are ignorant and do not think of other organisms when doing something. Hopefully this does not have any detrimental effects on the environment but it may take many more years before we realize the full extents of this.