The global tendency today is to get to a completely clean energy, for the industry and for people's homes and transportation, by developing wind and solar power.

As research evolves, it develops even more advanced wind and solar energy production and in the near future this green energy will take over fossil fuels, believes Nobel laureate Walter Kohn, PhD.

In the last ten years, photovoltaic energy production increased globally by almost 90 percent and wind energy by about 10 percent so Kohn predicts that these two energies will bloom during the next decade and beyond.

“These trends have created two unprecedented global challenges: one is the threatened global shortage of acceptable energy, the other is the unacceptable, imminent danger of global warming and its consequences,” he said.

At the symposium of the American Chemical Society’s 240th National Meeting, Kohn said that another problem is the reduction of individual energy consumption, mainly in the developed countries where the population is nearly stable.

He gave the example of the US per capita consumption of gasoline, “approximately 5 times higher than the global average”.

“The less developed world, understandably, aims to bring their standard of living to a level similar to that of the highly developed countries; in return they should stabilize their growing populations.”

Kohn said that he believed that if the research and the development of alternative energies continues at the current rate, it is possible that sometime soon, solar and wind could become the world's main energy sources.

Kohn works at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in 1998, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

He said that in the next 10 to 30 years, our current global energy consumption, which is now 60 percent out of oil and natural gas production, will attain its peak after which it will rapidly decline.

“The most obvious [response to these challenges] is continuing scientific and technical progress providing abundant and affordable alternative energies, safe, clean and carbon-free,” he added, and because these challenges are taking global proportions, the scientists' work should enjoy an international support and cooperation.

For now, Walter Kohn declares himself impressed by the students on his campus that are spending their own money to solarize a sports building.

“When it comes to providing leadership by young people in the area of energy conservation and energy efficiency and global warming — they are fantastic,” he said.

“It is a major social commitment for our times.”