by Peter Croft

Renewable energy: agreed! But how do we get there? That’s the challenge addressed by a recent article in Yes magazine.

The author – Richard Heinberg – outlines a three-level strategy to make significant progress over ten years.

Level one: electrify as much energy as we can and switch out coal in favour of solar and wind power; and move to electric cars. Change some of our food production systems to sequester carbon and use less fossil fuel. That cuts out 40% of carbon emissions.

Level two: add lots of energy storage at the grid level, swap out natural gas for renewables in electricity generation and put in much more electric transportation. That brings us to an 80% cut.

Level three: the really hard stuff. Reworking concrete manufacture, food production systems, communications technologies and computers almost bring us to zero emissions. However if we can also sequester more carbon than we use for powering planes we will get very close to zero carbon emissions.

The end result will also be a very different style of economy than today.

As we think about this strategy and how we will need to participate, we might reflect on some of the thinking we did in the early days of Sustainable Communities on living more locally and simply in our use of energy, food, transport, waste and water.

For more, read the full article here.