#4 - What are the best sources of clean energy? - TurtleTalks

Monica Laurence: What types of energy, in your mind, is clean and what type of energy isn't clean?

Leilani Munter: Clean energy is an energy like solar or wind or hydro where you're not burning something and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Climate change is something that I think everybody is getting very familiar with. We've been burning fossil fuels, so oil and coal, and it's releasing, as a by-product, carbon dioxide, which is accumulating in the atmosphere and causing changes in our ecosystem and causing climate to change.

Monica Laurence: So coal and oil are not clean?

Leilani Munter: Coal, and oil, and natural gas.

Emilee Pierce: If you have to burn it, it isn't clean. Clean energy is anything that harnesses the natural energies of the world, which can be the sun, which we've talked about, or it can be the wind.

Dawn Lippert: Clean energy also tends to include water power. So that can come in a whole variety of forms, whether it's from hydroelectric, from run of the river, so all the rivers you see around, you have a lot of energy in them, and ocean energy which is kind of a long way off but is still something that's pretty promising. Another exciting one which is geothermal energy, which comes from volcanoes, so there's actually natural sources of heat in the earth, so you don't have to burn new things, you can actually just harness the heat that's already in the earth and use that to spin turbines also. And finally bio-energy is also regarded as a clean kind of energy because instead of burning something that's been in the earth for millions of years, it's something that you can burn and then regrow.

Monica Laurence: What would you be burning?

Dawn Lippert: For bio-energy it can include easily anything that's biomass, so any of these plants around us or on this island. Even any of the coconut husks or agricultural waste and then also bio-fuels like ethanol and bio-diesel count as well.

Leilani Munter: I see wind, and solar, and hydropower as being superior to biomass because there's not this, "Oh, P.S., in order to make it carbon neutral, you have to replant all of that and then that will sequester it."

Emilee Pierce: I will say certainly it's cleaner, than what we're currently doing.

Rick Thompson: We're talking about forms of energy that are vastly superior to the dominant forms of energy in the world.

Monica Laurence: And how about nuclear?

Rick Thompson: This is probably the most highly debatable topic. I would personally say that nuclear is a very clean form of energy.

Leilani Munter: But what about when you have more climate change events like we are having, and I'll use Fukushima as an example, and now you're leaking vast amounts of radioactive material into the ocean.

Rick Thompson: That's a problem.

Dan Morrell: Everything, actually, is solar; wind, wave, geothermal, solar, biomass, the whole lot, is actually powered by the sun. If you've got wave energy, it's around about 5% of global needs could come from wave, 15% to 18% from wind. Geothermal, you've probably got many more times than the world could ever need available to us just a few miles down and if you get up to solar, it's 22,000, 23,000 times more energy than we could ever possibly need. So it's rather silly for us to be redundantly sort of spinning on a pin head about oil and coal when we've actually got every bit of energy available to us to move away from it right now.