Yes, indeed, the world can be changed, if citizens constructively take an interest in their lives and the sustainability of their communities.

The New Yorker just provides us with a great story on this, about a Danish island, where the population decided to tackle the energy crisis head on:

“Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø (Danish Island) 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.”

The article outlines the importance of policy support by the Danish government, but also the crucial fact that the islanders own the energy production themselve, and are therefore very motivated.

In the middle of the article, the author Elizabeth Kolbert switches to Switzerland:

“Around the same time that Samsø was designated Denmark’s renewable-energy island, a group of Swiss scientists who were working on similar issues performed a thought experiment. The scientists, all of whom were affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, asked themselves what level of energy use would be sustainable, not just for an island or a small European nation but for the entire world. The answer they came up with—two thousand watts per person—furnished the name for a new project: the 2,000-Watt Society… He continued, “The difficult thing is what I call ‘constructed Switzerland.’ You in America could call it ‘constructed United States’—the buildings and how they are built, but also where they are built and, even·` more important, the roads, the railroads, the lines for energy, for wastewater, and so on. It’s not economically feasible to replace everything in one instant.” But since infrastructure should in any case be replaced at the rate of roughly two per cent a year, if the project is approached incrementally, it’s a different task. Then, Imboden said, “it suddenly is feasible … .”

While most of the developing world is much below it, Europe uses twice as much, and the US three times.

Nevertheless, the scientists involved insist that it is not a scenario for a hard life, but very feasible, as it corresponds to the usage of the early 1960’s, certainly not a time of misery for Europe.

Some interesting remarks in the article:

– Relying on widely agreed-upon figures, the scientists estimated that two-thirds of all the primary energy consumed in the world today is wasted, mostly in the form of heat that nobody wants or uses.

– with currently available technologies, buildings could be made eighty per cent more efficient, cars fifty per cent more efficient, and motors twenty-five per cent more efficient.

The article concludes with a few portraits of Swiss families leading very satisfying 2,000 watt lives at present and concludes:

“Few parts of the U.S. may be as windy as Samsø, or as well organized as Switzerland, but just about everywhere there are possibilities for generating energy more inventively and using it more intelligently. Realizing these possibilities will require a great deal of effort. We may well decide not to make this effort. Such a choice to put off change, however, will merely drive us toward it.”