Danish visions on an fossil fuel free society
Gripped by heat anxiety I yesterday night started looking for some good news about technological ways to limit CO2 emissions. I ended up with a report ordered by the Copenhagen City Counsil. It outlines the ways the city (and the country) are to become a a low-carbon society independent of fossil fuels by 2050.
Denmark is already a long way, but we are also a country that has very few natural resources, and who until the seventies depended almost solely on coal and oil. Decentralised solutions in electricity and district heating owned by the end-consumers are one of the great successes of the Danish restructuring, but transport is still as good as unsolved (the growing bicycle culture in the larger cities does not matter all that much on a larger scale, but it does keep citizens more healthy leaving some more money for the research and infrastructure changes).
The document is of course mainly about Copenhagen, but should be interesting for everybody that wants to know about the possibilities for creating a CO2 neutral city or country. I found other documents, but they were much more newspeak'y while this one is quite practical in its approach.
COPENHAGEN ENERGY VISION 2050
A sustainable vision for bringing a capital to 100% renewable energy
Like you say, we have already come a very long way in Denmark, but the sad truth is that it isn't enough, the effects of what we are doing in Denmark are very small if you look at it globally...We need the rest of the world to follow if we, the human race , want to make an impact...So we need to promote, make people aware..
Yesterday, I heard in the radio, that even if we keep under 2 degrees in global higher temperature, it probably isn't enough...We are already at 1 degree, and we need to act now, globally, in 10-15 years it may be too late!
Glad you bring up the topic!
Like minimizing your own CO2 footprint, Denmark's efforts are close to nothing on a global scale. But we can't do anything else.
Being a large scale demonstration, developing and fine-tuning the smart-grid and probably earn some money on the pioneering is what we can do, and maybe it will make a little difference.
Dude, I was just reading about Copenhagen's plan too! I managed to pass a city council resolution in my city attempting to match Denmark's goals.
I can't wait for a fossil free future, think of how much cleaner all the city air will be...
That is brilliant. We can live as fossil free as we like ourselves, but it won't matter until we take it to the political world. I think that Copenhagen is a good case-study because we do not have any easy solutions - no water-power like in Sweden and Norway, no geothermics like in Iceland. We rejected nuclear power back in the seventies and now we have to be clever to make it all work.
Try to look at our decentralised district heating, that is one of the major achievements and remember that these decentralised structure is owned by cooperatives. That is a major point.
Best of luck from here!
Yeah, I really wish we had gone way more in on nuclear, would make things a lot easier for us now.
Still, TCM has gone international, with chapters sprouting up in Canada, hopefully the model makes its way to Europe and Asia as well!
Yes, nuclear energy would probably have been developed into something more secure and thorium might have been in use already. On the other hand - it is still a centralised approach with all the risks and problems connected.
I will start sharing the TCM site on some of the other social network I am on and see what I can do. even though the political establishment here is very much working on the issue, we are all dependent on each other. People in Denmark know that we can do nothing that matters if not larger nations do as well!
also see my comment above about The Climate Mobilization, haha
:)