Colgate University

First-Year Course Offerings — Fall 2019

FSEM 130   Energy and Sustainability
Credits1
RestrictionsNo 2022 2021 2020 Open to first-years only
Pre-Requisites
Co-Requisites
Core Area Sciences
Area of Inquiry
Liberal Arts Practices

Faculty Profile for Professor Crotty

Our current use of energy is unsustainable. Fossil fuels, which were deposited on Earth over hundreds of millions of years, will largely be exhausted over the course of just a few hundred years. Global climate change makes our situation even more unsustainable—we need to stop using fossil fuels long before they run out if we want to avoid catastrophic environmental change. This course takes a quantitative approach to learning about our current energy use, so that students can understand how our personal choices and lifestyles affect energy use. Please note that some of the assignments will require mathematics at the pre-calculus level. We also discuss how we might meet our energy needs in the future through renewable resources: what technologies are available now, what are their costs, and how much energy can they provide. Students who successfully complete this seminar will receive course credit for CORE 101S and satisfy their Scientific Perspectives core requirement.

Patrick Crotty is a theoretical physicist and uses techniques from physics, mathematics, and engineering to study the dynamics of neural networks. He also has longstanding extracurricular interests in history, sociology, and geography, in particular the factors (including resource usage/depletion) that influence the rise and fall of civilizations.