Climate Crisis: Implementing Solutions
An interdisciplinary introduction to the evidence, causes, consequences, and practical responses to climate change. The course connects climate science with energy production and use, examining fossil fuels, nuclear and hydroelectric generation, wind and solar resources, energy storage, transportation electrification, electric-power infrastructure, conservation, economics, public policy, equity, and the ethical responsibility to implement available solutions.
Objectives
- Interpret major lines of evidence for global warming and explain the role of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions.
- Explain the physical mechanisms that connect atmospheric greenhouse gases, radiation, temperature, and climate feedbacks.
- Assess environmental, economic, technical, and social consequences of climate change and proposed responses.
- Use energy, power, efficiency, capacity factor, and emissions calculations to compare energy technologies.
- Describe how coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, and solar resources are converted into useful energy.
- Compare conventional and renewable generation using resource availability, cost, reliability, emissions, land use, and lifecycle impacts.
- Explain the purpose and operation of major energy-storage technologies, including pumped storage and electrochemical batteries.
- Compare petroleum vehicles, hybrids, and electric vehicles using energy consumption, charging, efficiency, operating cost, and emissions.
- Describe the fundamentals of electricity generation, transformers, transmission, distribution, and grid operation.
- Evaluate climate solutions through the lenses of public policy, environmental justice, intergenerational ethics, and personal or collective action.
Textbooks
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
Bill Gates · Knopf
Energy: Its Use and the Environment, 5th Edition
Roger A. Hinrichs, Merlin H. Kleinbach · Cengage Learning
Modules
Description: Examines observed global-temperature change and the principal measurement records used to establish that Earth is warming, including surface temperature, ocean heat, sea level, glaciers, ice sheets, and other independent indicators.
Description: Introduces country-level warming, greenhouse gases, emissions trends, and the evidence linking recent climate change to human activity and fossil-fuel use.
Description: Develops the greenhouse effect through historical carbon-dioxide concentrations, black-body radiation, absorption and re-radiation of heat, and the interaction between atmospheric gases and outgoing infrared energy.
Description: Connects greenhouse-gas emissions to consequences for people and ecosystems, comparing emissions across activities and countries while considering vulnerability, inequity, migration, and adaptation.
Description: Explores barriers to climate action, including interpreting climate data, organized denial and misinformation, the economics of greenhouse-gas emissions, political constraints, and the difficulty of coordinating global action.
Description: Frames climate mitigation through the Paris Agreement, national commitments, emissions pathways, available low-carbon technologies, conservation, and the practical choices that can limit future warming.
Description: Introduces the units and relationships used throughout the course, including energy, power, electrical quantities, unit conversion, household consumption, efficiency, and carbon-emissions calculations.
Description: Applies energy and power relationships to practical examples involving lighting, food energy, batteries, household electricity, fuel consumption, cost, and carbon intensity.
Description: Introduces coal formation, mining, reserves, production, transport, and use in electricity generation, with attention to the fuel's role in the energy system and its environmental consequences.
Description: Compares coal ranks and heating values, follows coal through combustion and steam-electric generation, and examines plant efficiency, pollution controls, waste, health effects, and carbon emissions.
Description: Introduces natural-gas resources, extraction, processing, transmission, storage, and combustion for electricity generation, including combined-cycle plants, efficiency, methane leakage, and comparative emissions.
Description: Continues natural-gas generation through resource discovery, liquefied-natural-gas production and transport, gas markets, steam cycles, Carnot efficiency, and steam-turbine operation.
Description: Introduces the history and operating principles of hydroelectric generation, relating water head and flow to turbine power while examining dams, reservoirs, run-of-river plants, and resource potential.
Description: Extends hydroelectric analysis to major facilities, turbine types, pumped storage, tidal and wave resources, operating flexibility, and the environmental and social consequences of water-power projects.
Description: Introduces the history and physics of nuclear fission, atomic structure, isotopes, binding energy, chain reactions, reactor components, and the conversion of nuclear heat into electricity.
Description: Examines nuclear-fuel energy density, uranium resources and enrichment, reactor operation and safety, radioactive waste, major accidents, costs, small modular reactors, and nuclear power's role in decarbonization.
Description: Traces the history of wind energy and introduces modern wind-turbine components, rotor and drivetrain arrangements, turbine siting, and the conversion of moving air into electrical power.
Description: Develops the physics of wind-energy conversion, including wind power density, swept area, tip-speed ratio, aerodynamic limits, rotor control, and the technical factors that determine turbine output.
Description: Examines wind-farm wake effects, capacity factor, seasonal production, reliability and downtime, geographic deployment, onshore and offshore resources, costs, and the growth of wind generation.
Description: Introduces transportation energy use, crude-oil formation and production, petroleum supply chains, refining, fuel use, vehicle emissions, and the transportation sector's contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions.
Description: Follows crude oil through fractional distillation, cracking, isomerization, and finished petroleum products, then compares fuel properties, vehicle efficiency, consumption, prices, and alternatives to petroleum dependence.
Description: Surveys electricity-storage needs and technologies, including pumped storage, alkaline and lithium-ion cells, battery chemistry and nomenclature, performance measures, material supply chains, flow batteries, and compressed-air storage.
Description: Introduces battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and hybrid vehicles; charging levels and infrastructure; vehicle efficiency; tire-pressure effects; adoption trends; and practical calculations for electric-vehicle operation.
Description: Applies driving profiles, fuel economy, regenerative braking, energy-per-mile, MPGe, operating cost, lifecycle emissions, and charging demand to compare internal-combustion, hybrid, and electric vehicles.
Description: Introduces voltage, current, resistance, power, electromagnetic induction, AC and three-phase generation, transformers, transmission, distribution, power lines, and the structure of the electric-power system.
Description: Traces the source, history, and scale of solar energy, then examines solar-thermal systems, photovoltaic conversion, residential and utility-scale deployment, resource variability, economics, land use, and grid integration.
Description: Introduces fusion energy through mass-energy conversion, hydrogen isotopes, deuterium-tritium fuel, inertial and magnetic confinement, the National Ignition Facility, ITER, engineering challenges, and fusion's potential role in future energy systems.
Description: Integrates the course's climate evidence, emissions drivers, generation technologies, storage, transportation, grid fundamentals, conservation strategies, and ethical or policy choices into a framework for evaluating and implementing climate solutions.