An article in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert talks about how the island’s 4,300 residents used energy much like most other people in the late 1990′s, and that their attitude towards energy was “as long as it continued to arrive they weren’t much interested in it.” They used heating oil, brought to the island in tankers, to heat their homes; and used electricity imported from the Danish mainland – electricity that was mostly generated by burning coal.
Then the residents went about changing how they got their energy. They replaced their furnaces with heat pumps, formed energy cooperatives, and organized seminars on wind power. In just a couple of years their fossil-fuel use had been cut in half.
By 2003, they were exporting excess electricity instead of importing it. And, by 2005 the energy the island was producing from renewable sources was greater than what they needed.
And even though they have greatly reduced carbon emissions and their carbon footprint (I’m very envious) , they are modest about it. Yes, they are proud of what they have done but they insist they are ordinary people who are not wealthy nor highly educated and not all that adventurous.
While the residents of the island of Samso have reduced their carbon footprint a lot, the world is expected to consume about 2 percent more fossil fuels in 2009 than it did in 2008 despite the focus on living greener and developing and using alternative energy sources.
To me it seems that while the rest of us talk about how important it is for us to save the environment , reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce our carbon footprint; the residents of Samso quietly did just that without publicity or fanfare.
Related posts: