The Exploitation Of Earth s Natural Resources - 1504 Words

â€Å"We live on this world as if we have another planet to go to† (Swearingen). Exploitation of earth’s natural resources has been going on for a long time, at an incredibly high rate to match the increasingly alarming demands and needs of today’s world. It is important that people realize the consequence of such blatant exploitation of earth’s finite resources. Here steps in the concept of environmental stewardship which teaches us to responsibly use and therefore protect the natural environment through conservation and sustainable practices (Environmental stewardship). Environmental stewardship requires sustainable management of earth’s all finite resources like air, forests, water, land and most importantly fossil fuels. However oil is the†¦show more content†¦It would become clear that the cons outweigh the pros that is, it does more harm than good to the humanity. The development of these tar sands blatantly refutes everything which e nvironmental stewardship stands for. The first thing to consider is that tar sands itself isn’t a good energy resource. The amount of cost involved and the energy required to harvest oil from tar pits is far too great to ever become sustainable. Firstly, it requires huge amounts of energy during the extraction phase which requires heavy machinery to successfully pull out of the surface. Secondly, it also consumes a lot of energy in terms of transportation with in the plant and refinement to pull out the basic material. This method of obtaining oil is far more energy intensive as compared to other conventional drilling methods. Finally, transportation of the oil to other areas itself consumes energy. Even if the cost of transportation is disregarded for being less than other oil sources, the costs and energy required for refinement and extraction are still pretty high. Keeping this in mind, the EROEI, energy return on energy investment, for tar sands is among the lowest. This means there is less profitability to the world in developing tar sands, as it requires huge amount of energy to obtain a slightly higher amount of energy in return at the expense of far greater environmental