Words matter. These are the best David J. C. MacKay Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We can’t be anti-everything – we need an energy plan that adds up. But there’s a lack of numeracy in the public discussion of energy. Where people do use numbers, they select them to sound big and score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.
The only thing that really scales up apart from nuclear is solar power from other people’s deserts.
To have constructive conversations about the world’s energy options, one needs to take a calm look at the numbers.
Electric cars are really very cool. Air-source heat pumps are great.
Fridges can be modified to nudge their internal thermostats up and down just a little in response to the main’s frequency in such a way that, without ever jeopardising the temperature of your butter, they tend to take power at times that help the grid.
The United States consumes power per land-area at a rate three times the average. Even though they are more energy efficient, densely populated industrial countries like Germany, Britain and Japan have even bigger power consumption per area.
Solving climate change is a complex topic, but in a single crude brush-stroke, here is the solution: the price of carbon dioxide must be such that people stop burning coal without capture.
The amount of energy saved by switching off the phone charger is exactly the same as the energy used by driving an average car for one second.
We must not let ourselves be swept off our feet in horror at the danger of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous. It’s just dangerous, much as coal mines, petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning and wind turbines are dangerous.
I was writing a book about sustainable energy, and a friend asked me, ‘Well, how much energy do you use at home?’ And I was embarrassed. I didn’t actually know.
Most of physics is about energy, and physicists understand inefficiencies. I wanted to write a book about our energy options in a neutral, human-accessible form.
The discussion about energy options tends to be an intensely emotional, polarised, mistrustful, and destructive one. Every option is strongly opposed: the public seem to be anti-wind, anti-coal, anti-waste-to-energy, anti-tidal-barrages, anti-carbon-tax, and anti-nuclear.
