Environmental Persuasive Essay

            Something that has always astounded me about the human race is how little we truly think about our future. I personally believe that it is simply the nature of man to constantly be on a quest for instant gratification. Despite what we may like to trick ourselves into believing, we really are subpar when it comes to long-term thinking. At the rate that we are using up our fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources, we will have exhausted our limited supplies by the time much of our generation's grandchildren are even born! Not to mention how our selfish pursuit of fossil fuels is directly affecting the environment itself. Many of the methods we use for obtaining these nonrenewable resources are extremely detrimental to a wide array of endangered species and their natural habitats, thus further provoking the species' scarcity. And finally, the amount of pollution that these actions, and even many of the actions of everyday citizens such as you and I, are quite literally killing the Earth. We are a plague upon the environmental health of this Earth. We have poisoned the waters, infected the grounds that we walk on, and have caused a fever that at this rate is only going to rise more and more, each and every day. This selfishness, and blatant disregard of worrying about what is to become of us and this Earth is truly man's greatest Achilles' heel, and will ultimately be the cause of our downfall.
             It is no secret that fossil fuels such as natural gases, crude oil, and coal are finite, and that it's only a matter of time before we exhaust our extremely limited supplies of these resources. In 2014, the United States consumed approximately 26.79 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. At this rate, scientists theorize that we will have completely depleted our supply of natural gases sometime in the 2070s. When it comes to crude oil, we use an average of 11 billion tons a year. At this rate, scientists fear that we will run out of oil by the year 2052.