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In this First-Year Seminar, we will try to understand together the basic physics of energy and climate change. We'll try to derive estimates, from basic high-school physics, for how much energy it takes to drive a car across the country; fly across the country; to get ChatGPT to write an essay for us; to heat and light our homes; send a SpaceX Starship into space; etc. Should you be riding that electric scooter or e-bike when you could ride a (muscle-powered) bike? We'll figure out how much carbon is put into the atmosphere each time we do any of these things, and how that carbon affects the climate. We'll think about ways to save energy, reduce carbon emissions, and sequester carbon. We'll study various prospects for clean energy and what needs to be done to have them implemented. We'll try to figure out if we should be thinking about geo-engineering. We'll spend the first few weeks working together to identify specific questions we'd like to think about and then follow through the rest of the semester, relying on varied sources along the way.