20. Why Does It Matter?
Why Does It Matter? We have been writing this column now for almost a year, but recently realized we’ve neglected to explain why. First of all, the title: Energy Matters. You can read this as a short sentence, with “Energy” as the subject and “Matters” as the verb. Or you can just see it as a noun phrase, a label: “matters having to do with energy.” In brief, we write about the latter because we believe the former. To a physicist, pretty much everything boils down to energy. Energy is essential to our daily lives in every way, and more so all the time. Cumulatively, this results in the fact that human society’s energy demands are so immense now that they are substantially altering the energy dynamics of the planet itself. We make domestic energy-related decisions all the time, but how often are they well thought out? How often do we just follow assumptions or our “instincts” about what makes sense? Says the physicist, not often enough and altogether ...