Renewable Energy

Introduction

Our current primary source of energy, fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) has many costs associated with it. These costs are not just those involved with the extraction, processing and transportation of the fuels. Societal costs of fossil fuels include human health problems due to air pollution and environmental degradation caused by acid rain, global warming, and water pollution. The continued use of these fuels since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to power all aspects of society has released the amount of carbon that was sequestered for millions of years into the current atmosphere in a very short time. With this large input, we have upset the global balance of carbon to the point that we have the highest concentration of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) for the last 650,000 years [1]. This substance is increasing at an exponential rate and within the current generation's lifetime, the CO ₂ concentration will most likely double pre industrial levels. In order to understand the global balance of the carbon cycle, this unit will include hands-on field measurements, remote sensing, and estimation of where carbon is stored and how it is exchanged between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere. Looking through the research and technical articles through the curriculum unit writing process, I conclude that our options to lessen the effects of the increased levels of CO ₂ are to manage terrestrial lands to sequester more carbon and reduce the amount of CO ₂ produced through our daily lives. With this in mind, I am going to lead my students through investigations to determine the carbon sequestering capacity of our local environment, make the case for conserving our petroleum resource for feed stock for products instead of burning it all as a fuel, and have students research alternatives to current transportation fuels to determine the best options for transportation in order to lower the carbon output of our transportation sector.

The intended audience for this curriculum unit is 10 ^th grade vocational students enrolled in my Environmental Landscape Technology Program. These students will spend the first four and a half weeks of their sophomore course engaged in this unit to learn a number of skills from their task list. Topics included in this unit include gathering data in the field, analyzing data and maps, and synthesizing their data into written reports. Students will engage in a number of land-cover and soils-related protocols including biometry measurements of woodlands and characterization of woodland soils. This unit will also explore the carbon cycle almost in a "cradle to grave" sense, starting with plants fixing carbon using solar radiation during the process of photosynthesis, tracking inputs from anthropogenic sources (most notably transportation), exploring the global fluxes of carbon and cycling into the carbon sinks and quantifying how carbon is sequestered by our oceans and our terrestrial systems. Many science and mathematics concepts seem to make no sense to students since they cannot see the relevance to their application. Through the context of environmental science, students can see relevance to biological and physiological processes, chemical reactions and mathematical calculations and interpretation. Students must understand that environmental science is not a secondary and useless science: it is the real application of many aspects of science, math and English and is very multidisciplinary in nature. This unit would lend itself well to any environmental science class. I hope that you will be able to implement some of this unit into your environmental science class to improve the engagement of your students and to also put some real science into your classes. I think of my classroom as a catalyst for intrinsically motivating students about the environment. I strive to do this by developing relevant and engaging curriculum units which is ultimately how to increase the students' understanding of content and empower students with the ability to analyze information and develop their higher order thinking skills.

Being a vocational instructor, I see first hand the importance of active discovery of skills and content information, compared to passive reception of information in a lecture context. This rings true and can be performed in a classroom setting. This is further enhanced with hands-on vocational skills that are part of this unit. The hands-on activities that are incorporated into this unit mimic the actual tasks that a research scientist or environmental field technician would do as part of their job. This puts the students in practical learning situations that are relevant and most times bring about an intrinsic motivation for learning the content. The data collected by my students will be uploaded to the NASA G.L.O.B.E. website (www.globe.gov) via the Internet, which also helps with the motivation, since they are engaging in an international data-sharing project. Students can appreciate the data they will be analyzing much better if they have actually collected some data in the field themselves. Having students analyze data throughout the unit helps develop creative and critical thinking skills that are usually not developed in normal classroom instruction.

Many of the ills in the environment today are tied to the use of fossil fuels for the production of the products our society uses, energy production, and transportation. Talking to students about polluting power plants and factories does not really connect them to their role in burning fossil fuels and contributing to pollution. Start talking about cars with teenage students and you gain the attention of the whole class. Most of the students do not see cars as a polluting technology. They see cars as a necessity to get to and from school and their jobs.

When speaking with students about cars their biggest complaint is about how much it costs to buy gas for their car. If asked where the gasoline comes from they will tell you that it is taken out of the ground and put into the tank trucks and then taken to the local gas stations. They do not know the whole story about all the processing and effort it takes to make that gallon of gas they burn up so readily in their own personal internal combustion engine. Teaching students about the origins and the processing of crude oil into products really gives them a better appreciation for this amazing non-renewable resource. My goal is to have the students realize that this resource is so unique and that we need to conserve it for making the myriad of products derived from it instead of turning 90% of each barrel into fuels that are burned and emit heat and pollutants to the atmosphere.

The first day of the unit, students are placed into groups that will research and present to the class how different alternative/renewable energies could be used to power our transportation. The student groups will be given a binder that includes journal articles, Internet resources, and other information on the specific alternative fuel. Student groups will read through and decipher the information in the binder as well as "researching the research" on the web to develop a multimedia presentation. The sheet I will use to assign the project to my students is included at the end of the unit under lessons. The students will be given a rubric indicating the minimum requirements for the presentation but have quite a bit of creative license when developing their presentation. This project will be done outside of the class and will be the responsibility of the research group. We are fortunate that the students are able to stay after school for extra help on Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout the year and are provided with transportation home. This also helps build a group dynamic and an overall good work ethic since students are required to interact and take responsibility for learning outside the classroom.