Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap

Finally, somebody speaks logically and with credibility about how little actions have no practical effect on energy use or carbon output. Like he said, if you eat hot-cooked and/or refrigerated food, drive to work, and are socially acceptably clean, then frankly you use a ton of electricity. Disconnecting your phone charger does nothing.<p>Hopefully the mass media will report on this in the US.<p>I was surprised to learn that current nuclear technologies don't have the throughput to handle a lot of our energy needs in the long-term. Hopefully the new fission technologies (or even better, fusion!) get developed and put into practice.

This guy sounds pretty good.<p>I took a physics class like this ("Energy and Society") from Philip Taylor back at Case Western Reserve University ("a tradition of excellence that's even longer than our name"). To sum up the lesson of the class in a sentence: One of the most useful skills of the physicist is the ability and inclination to do simple back-of-the-envelope calculations, and to take the results seriously.

5 minute shower * (5 gal/min) * (440 BTU [to heat water 85 degrees]/gal ) = 11000 BTU or 3.223kWh or ~16 hours of 200-watt HDTV<p>1 gallon of gasoline = 115000 BTU or 33.7kWh or 10 5-minute hot showers<p>Am I willing to take cold showers (not sure..)?

Very much agree with the order of magnitude argument. I never understood all this economic lighting fad: i use economical light bulbs because they save me money, not because they save the planet. Everything I save this way is probably less then one brake of a freight train.<p>What irritates me more is how much we allow people to push their irrational arguments over us and let them dominate the discussion. I strongly doubt Greenpeace hasn't made the same math, they just don't care. And still they can make someone be afraid to be labeled as pro-nuclear. Why? Why do we allow obvious flawed theories be pushed around until they become common sense?

The book can be downloaded here: <a href="http://www.withouthotair.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.withouthotair.com/</a>

&#62; He says he’s largely letting his machine-learning lab at Cambridge run itself these days<p>I hope the humor was intentional -- especially since The Register has a whole section dedicated to the "Rise of the Machines™."

I find it useful to think in terms of watts, like Saul Griffith does here: <a href="http://www.wattzon.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wattzon.org/</a><p>It puts 1W standby energy in context of a total "wattage" we each use.

Very fascinating. We sometimes forget that far from being 'clean' energy, the sun is actually a massive nuclear furnace. It just happens to be far enough away :-)