A project by scientists associated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to create a sustainable future. The goal is to reduce energy consumption by the average person to 2,000 watts. An average American currently consumes 12,000 watts, and most Western Europeans 6,000. However, according to the director of the project, Roland Stulz, “the 2,000-Watt Society is not a program of hard life. It is not what we call
Gürtel enger schmallen (belt tightening), it’s not starving, it’s not having less comfort or fun. It’s a creative approach to the future.” The technology exists to use energy more efficiently and to generate renewable energy. Elizabeth Kolbert has written an excellent
article on the subject in the current issue of the
New Yorker, with a report on a small Danish village that is actually producing more renewable energy than it uses. Ultimately, a sustainable future will depend on our ability to cut energy consumption and to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, which will come at a cost and a great deal of effort, but as Kolbert points out in the article, “to put off change, however, will merely drive us toward it.”