Ours is an energy-intensive society. American energy consumption per capita is now over ten times what it was when our nation was founded, and the rest of the world is following our example. This is leading to increasingly severe worldwide problems such as competition for scarce resources, pollution, congestion and, most likely, global climate change. Many governments and industries are aware of these issues and numerous attempts at remediation (some sensible and some not) have been proposed or adopted. The goals of this seminar are to explain the underlying physical principles related to the production and consumption of energy and to use this knowledge to explore and to discuss matters such as energy conservation, the so-called hydrogen economy, electric cars, nuclear power (both fission and fusion), carbon sequestration, and the feasibility of various alternative energy sources.