David JC MacKay, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (2008), Chapters 1-4 (Pages 1-34)
Göran Wall, Exergetics (2009), Pages 1-50
Penn State University Center for Medieval Studies, "Colonial America's pre-industrial age of wood and water"
Sashi Sivramkrishna, "Production Cycles and Decline in Traditional Iron Smelting in the Maidan, Southern India, c. 1750-1950: An Environmental History Perspective" (2009), Environment and History 15(2): 163-197
Julian M Allwood and Jonathan M Cullen, Sustainable Materials with Both Eyes Open (2012), Chapters 1-3 (Pages 1-50) [The whole book is worth reading, especially if you're interested in buildings.]
Gus Speth, "American passage: Towards a new economy and a new politics" (2012), Ecological Economics 84: 181-186
(1) Referring to the Penn State or Sivramkrishna articles, why didn't societies without fossil fuels, such as 18th-Century Pennsylvania or India, build steel-framed structures? What resource utilization practices were facilitated by low population density (e.g. ~4 people per km2 in 18th-Century Pennsylvania)? If the population density were comparable to today's (e.g. 100 people per km2 in Pennsylvania), what would have been the alternatives?
(2) The Speth article questions the value of economic growth. What are the arguments that economic growth can be destructive? How would you expect engineering practice to be different in a world that did not see economic growth as the main goal of society? See also Chapter 17 of Allwood and Cullen.
(1) Summarize the concept of energy quality and how it relates to building and infrastructure design. Use as sources relevant sections of Wall's book, as well as the International Energy Agency's Annex 49 project website on "Low Exergy Systems for High-Performance Buildings and Communities" – this document (esp. the case studies in Chapter 7) might be particularly helpful.
(2) Pose and solve one or more numerical thermodynamics/exergy problems of interest to you, based on last week's reading and/or (some of) the following sources. Summarize what you learned from working through the problem(s).