Course · Intro
How energy and climate actually work
Energy is never created or destroyed — only moved and degraded. See how that one rule powers the world and warms it, and learn to tell a real climate-energy claim from a sales pitch.
Energy is the one thing nothing happens without — and it follows a rule so strict it has no exceptions: it is never created or destroyed, only moved from one form to another, losing a little to heat each time. This course takes the lid off the machine that rule builds. What energy is. How we actually power the world. Why burning it warms the planet. What changing that requires. Not a policy argument and not a doom story — a working understanding of the coupled energy-and-climate system you live inside, with the physics stated plainly and the numbers stated honestly.
What you'll be able to do
- Explain what energy actually is — that it is conserved, only ever converted, and always degrades a little to waste heat — and use watts and watt-hours correctly.
- Trace how the world is really powered — why fossil fuels won, why electricity must be balanced second by second, and why renewables face a timing-and-storage problem, not just a cost one.
- Explain the mechanism that warms the planet — the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle's stock-versus-flow, the feedbacks that make the system amplify, and why a small average shift is a big deal.
- Judge a climate or energy claim on its physics — separating the absolute from the relative, the stock from the flow, and an honest number from spin.
Course complete
You finished every lesson. Put your name on it.
Module 1 — Energy: the rule underneath everything
What energy actually is
Explain that energy is the capacity to do work, that it is conserved (never created or destroyed, only converted between forms), and that every device — a kettle, a car, a body — is just a converter moving energy from one store to another.
Power versus energy
Tell power (the rate energy is used, measured in watts) from energy (the total amount used, measured in watt-hours), and explain why confusing the two is behind most muddled energy talk — a kettle is high power for two minutes, a fridge low power all day.
Why you always lose some
Explain the second law in plain terms — every conversion spills some energy as low-grade waste heat that can't be fully recovered — and use that to read an efficiency figure (a power plant at 40%, a petrol engine at 25%).
Module 2 — How we power the world
Where our energy comes from
Explain that fossil fuels are ancient stored sunlight, and why they came to dominate — high energy density and easy storability — so the reader sees the transition is fighting real physical advantages, not just habit.
Electricity and the grid
Explain why electricity is special — it can't be stored at scale in the wires, so supply must equal demand every single second — and that the grid is a just-in-time machine balanced continuously, with frequency as the live signal of balance.
The intermittency problem
Explain why wind and solar are different from a power plant you can switch on — they deliver when the weather allows, not when demand asks — so the hard problem has shifted from the cost of generation to the timing of it, and why storage is the missing piece.
Module 3 — Why burning it warms the planet
The greenhouse effect
Explain the actual mechanism — sunlight arrives as visible light and warms the surface, the surface radiates heat back as infrared, and greenhouse gases absorb and re-emit that infrared, so the planet settles at a warmer balance than bare sunlight alone would set.
The carbon bathtub
Explain the carbon cycle as stock versus flow — the atmosphere is a bathtub, emissions the tap, natural absorption the drain — and why the level keeps rising as long as the tap runs faster than the drain, and why fossil carbon is different (locked away for millions of years, now released fast).
Why the system amplifies
Explain feedback loops — a small warming melts reflective ice and adds water vapour, which causes more warming — so the climate responds as an amplifier rather than in a straight line, and explain what a tipping point means in plain terms.
Why a small number is a big deal
Explain why a couple of degrees of global-average warming is not a warm afternoon — the difference between weather and climate, why a small shift in the average moves the extremes far more, and why a global average hides large local swings.
Module 4 — The transition, the price, and the spin
What decarbonizing really requires
Explain the shape of the transition — electrify what you can and run the grid clean, then tackle the hard-to-abate sectors (steel, cement, aviation, shipping) where electricity isn't a simple swap — so the reader sees why it's a whole-system rebuild, not one fix.
The price that's missing
Explain an externality — a real cost (the harm from emitted carbon) that doesn't show up in the price of the fuel, so the market systematically under-prices it — and how a carbon price is an attempt to put the missing cost back on the books.
Capstone: reading a climate or energy claim
Use the whole course to decode a real-style claim — separate the physics from the spin, the stock from the flow, the absolute from the relative, and a per-unit improvement from a total that's still rising — telling an honest number from a sales pitch.