How refreshing to find two innovative solutions to climate change and fossil fuel reductions, as portrayed in "The Island In The Wind" by Elizabeth Kolbert for The New Yorker.
Kolbert found Danish island Samsø that won its countries "contest" for implementing creative solutions to reduce carbon emissions, and build a renewable-energy model community.
The locals formed energy cooperatives, installed wind-turbines, replaced furnaces with heat pumps, and built hot-water plants that run on biomass.
“By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.” Yet, Kolbert writes, the farmers on Samsø insist that they are “normal people,” using simple solutions to the energy-consumption problem.
Meanwhile...
"It's a creative approach to the future," says Roland Stulz one of several scientists at the Swiss Federal Institure of Technology who posed the question:
What level of energy use is needed to sustain not only an island or small European nation but the world?
The answer:
2000 watts a year, which is the equivalent of 20 hundred watt light bulbs.
The average U.S. and Canadian citizen uses 12,000 watts. The average developing country citizen less than 2,000 watts.
The 2,000-Watt Society “gives industrialized countries a target for cutting energy use at the same time that it sets a limit for growth in developing nations.”
Robert Uetz, a Swiss engineer who is attempting to live a two-thousand-watt life, heats his home with a geothermal heat pump, generates electricity with photovoltaic panels on his roof, and takes public transportation instead of driving. He and his family “don’t experience it as a restriction,” he tells Kolbert. “On the contrary. I don’t feel like we’re giving up anything.”
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