Image Credit: Oyvind Solstad, Creative Commons.
Nothing is more essential to life than energy. Some species can do without free oxygen. DNA probably wasn't the first medium to convey information from one generation to the next. Exobiologists even theorize about replacing water with liquid methane. But regardless of the raw materials, life goes nowhere without a constant input of energy.
Why then, are most humans so woefully ignorant of where energy comes from and where it goes? Not only do we tend to take it for granted, but we have little understanding of basic energy science. And that ignorance comes with serious consequences.
Take climate change. The root of the problem can be traced to the way energy interacts with certain molecules, primarily those containing carbon and which constitute most of the emissions produced by the combustion of coal, oil and gas. Molecules of carbon dioxide and methane are transparent to energy in the form of ultraviolet radiation and visible light. But they absorb and then re-radiate energy in the infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The upshot of which is, if you increase the concentration of organic molecules in the atmosphere, light energy from the sun still reaches the Earth's surface, but the amount of infrared radiation (also known as heat) that gets trapped in the blanket of air surrounding the surface rises. This "greenhouse effect" is not a new idea. The fundamentals have been understood by scientists for almost 200 years, and the first prediction of what would eventually be called "global warming" was made a century ago.
So, no matter how much climatologists debate which specific consequences of global warming have been observed yet, and no matter how many newspapers ads paid for by conservative think tanks try to convince us that climate change is nothing to worry about, no one seriously challenges the basic science that tell us that sooner or later, we will warm the planet if we keep spewing carbon into the air.
A similar lack of understanding of the energy of motion has a more immediate impact, on both the quality of the air we breath and our wallets. There's a mathematical relationship between kinetic energy -- what something in motion has -- and how fast something is going. Specifically, the energy is proportional to the square of velocity.
This means it takes four times as as much energy to move something twice as fast. There are other factors that go into calculating just how much energy use will change, including rolling resistance of the car's tires on the road, aerodynamics and just how the engine is in tuned, but the fact remains that as you press on the accelerator, the rate of consumption of the chemical energy stored in the fuel tank goes up faster than does your speed, which is why driving the speed limit saves gas. When the U.S. government dropped the 55-mph national speed limit in the mid-1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles rose by 20.7%.
Would improved energy literacy keep people from speeding? Maybe not today, but wait until gas goes up to $4/gallon again. And I suspect that if the average American had a better grasp of the science behind the greenhouse effect, the number of those who don't believe climate is the biggest public policy challenge of our times would be a lot lower that it is today.