Tom is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. This post originally appeared on Tom's blog Do the Math.
A colleague pointed me toward an article in the LA Times last week, which lays out a plan to remove financial incentives legally bestowed on…
If you’re one of those humans who actually eats food, like I am, then a non-negligible part of your energy allocation goes into food production.…
I have described in a series of posts the efforts my wife and I have made to reduce our energy footprint on a number of…
A solar panel reaps only a small portion of its potential due to night, weather, and seasons, simultaneously introducing intermittency so that large-scale storage is…
If you are on-board with the sentiment that we should strive to reduce the amount of energy we consume as a means to relieve pressure…
My personal journey into home energy reduction began with taking stock of past energy use as reported on my utility bills. I quickly migrated toward…
So far on Do the Math, I’ve put out a lot of negative energy—whatever that means. Topics have often focused on what we can’t do,…
When I first approached the topic of societal energy in 2004, I became aware for the first time that our energy future was not in…
Having looked at the major alternatives to fossil fuel energy production (summarized here), we come away with the general sentiment that the easy days of…
Breathe, Neo. I’ve been running a marathon lately to cover all the major players that may provide viable alternatives to fossil fuels this century. Even…
Ah, fusion. Long promised, both on Do the Math and in real life, fusion is regarded as the ultimate power source—the holy grail—the “arrival” of…
With the exception of tidal energy, our focus thus far has been on land-based energy sources. Meanwhile, the ocean absorbs a prodigious fraction of the…
Who hasn’t enjoyed heat from the sun? Doing so represents a direct energetic transfer—via radiation—from the sun’s hot surface to your skin. One square meter…
The Earth started its existence as a red-hot rock, and has been cooling ever since. It’s still quite toasty in the core, and will remain…
A recent thrust on Do the Math has been to sort our renewable energy options into “abundant,” “potent,” and “niche” boxes. This is a reflection…
Having now sorted solar, wind, and tidal power into three “boxes,” let’s keep going and investigate another source of non-fossil energy and put it in…
Now is the time on Do the Math when we scan the energy landscape for viable alternatives to fossil fuels. In this post, we’ll look…
For me, the most delightful turn of events in the ultimate nerd-song “Particle Man” by They Might Be Giants, is that after introducing (in order…
Three previous posts have focused on transportation efficiency of gasoline cars, electric cars, and on the practicalities of solar-powered cars. What about personal-powered transport—namely, walking…
If you like the sun, and you like cars, then I’m guessing you’d love to have a solar-powered car, right? This trick works well for…