President Obama's stance

President Obama plans to give hybrid and electric car users a $7,000 tax credit for the fact that they use alternative modes of transportation. He wants to have research in to the option of creating ethanol out of plant waste not just out of corn. He also believes that the development of these alternative fuels and energy sources will provide more jobs for Americans. The jobs provided could not be shipped over seas to the leading oil producing countries that are not necessarily our friends. These counties include, but are not limited to: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Dr. Steven Chu's stance

Dr. Chu seems to take a stance that raising the price of gas will reduce the amount American consumers use there by leaving more gas for future generations. He also wants to raise the tax on gas to fund government research into alternative fuels and energy sources. He believes that efficient use of gas is the number one way to reduce our need for gas. Dr. Chu supports the idea of biofuels as the main long term solution to the gas dependency problem.


He is focusing on cleaning up nuclear waste that has contaminated some nuclear weapon plants, since the Cold War, nuclear weapon development, and basic sciences which is the main mission of the federal Department of Energy, which Dr. Chu is Head Secretary of.

Explaination of Concept map

The main concept is Energy Sustainability. There are four major categories: Renewable energy sources, Non-renewable energy sources, Green House Gases, and Energy Users. Each of the four categories are split up in to sub-topics.

Energy Concept Map

Analysis of Complex Systems

A. Trends & Patterns:

• The majority of items (over use of resources, wasted energy, food availability, processing/ packaging, recycling, and composting) lead back to "food intake".
• A vast majority of items (non renewable sources: coal, natural gas, petroleum, propane)lead back to "Green House Gases".

B. Time Delays:

• Recycling- The substances which are being recycled will not be tranformed into their recycled state imidiatly, it takes time and energy to complete the process.
• Population- When you add to the gene pool with your offspring they do not immeditly become power crazed energy wasters, they start out young and innocent.
• Transportation- Currently we are using non renewable resources that will cause us in future times to be rushed into using renewable resources as our only option.

C. Feedback Loops:

• Food intake- The more food we eat, the more packeging is needed which then leads into more waste that needs to be recycled. The processing of the food leads to wasted energy.
• Population- More population leads to more food intake, leading to more waste, more packeging, more wasted energy.

D. Leverage Points:

• Life Expectancy- If people were to die sooner in life they would use less energy, processing, polution, food intake, packeging, and other unfor seen circustances.
• Energy Efficiency- Energy efficiency goes down wasted energy goes up.