Check out this good, short, article in Time Magazine (July 2011).
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2026474_2026675_2079618,00.html
Stockholm, Sweden, is turning a lemon into lemonade. They were hoping to land the 2004 Summer Olympics, and lost the bid. They decided to turn the sports village into one of the world's most successful eco-villages. And discovered enough in so doing to create a goal for Stockholm to be a fossil-fuel-free city by 2050.
Key to much of this is a modern energy grid -- which the US has talked about, but not done much about (we have a very obsolete electrical grid here). The result in Stockholm is that you can already fish from bridges right in downtown -- the water is that clean.
By 2020 they think their efforts will yield a yearly carbon emissions of less than 1.5 ton per person.
The US currently has carbon emissions of 20.0 tons per person.
1.5 vs. 20 ? Consider how much that might reduce the cost of living here if we got on that band wagon? I am assuming we are buying those extra 18.5 tons of carbon emissions, per person, at the gas pump, or the electric meter. Diverting that much of our personal income (per year) to something else might relieve many economic problems we are currently experiencing.
No comments:
Post a Comment