Energy is something you don’t feel or touch or weight or taste or smell, but you use it all the time. When you eat your food, your body changes the energy in the food into energy the body needs so you can walk, run, throw things, kick things, make your bicycle move, do your homework, put your hand up in class. Your energy keeps you warm in winter. When your body has used up its store of energy it makes you hungry or tired. Energy isn’t just in your body. Energy comes from the sun, for example. Daylight is energy from the sun. The warmth you feel in the sun is another kind of sun energy. The wind is air moving quickly because the sun has made one part of the world hotter than another.
Plants use the sun’s energy to help them grow, and they pass that energy on to you when you eat them or when you eat meat from animals that ate plants.
Now, in our homes we burn natural gas or oil for hot water, cooking, or heating. We use electricity to run many appliances. These fuels came from plants that lived millions of years ago, were buried and cooked in the heat of the earth. As they cooked, they changed into deposits of coal, natural gas, and oil, and a lot of their sun energy stayed in the deposits. We use that energy to make the electricity that comes into our houses, and we use the gas and oil all the time at home and at school and at work.
Every time we use some of these old fuels, a bit more of the Earth’s store of captured sun energy has gone forever. Although it takes us very little time to use that energy, it takes such a long time to make it in the ground, we can’t replace it any time soon.
Every time you buy something that has come to the store near you on a truck and perhaps by rail or plane from far away, more of Earth’s store of energy has gone forever. That store gets smaller every day. When you are grown up and have children of your own, they might not have enough stored sun energy to help them live their lives.
What can you do about this? You can use ALTERNATIVE ENERGY, which is energy taken directly from the sun (like solar energy) or from energy created by the sun (like wind power). You can use old sun-energy EFFICIENTLY. “Efficiently” means not wasting, using carefully, making the most of, something. If you turn a light off when it’s not needed, or the tv, or a computer, and when you go for alternative energy, you’re using energy efficiently. Help make sure your children have the energy they will need!
You can find LOTS of information and ideas if you google “Energy Efficiency KidsEducation” and “Alternative Energy Kids Education.” Have fun! Be Energy Efficient!
by Kenneth Urquhart
Please contact the author
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KENNETH URQUHART <urq@verizon.net>
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or Ilana Greene at igreene@fas.harvard.edu
