Friday, June 1, 2007

Time for oil's swan song?

Meanie Greenie over at Greener than Money has two recent posts about reducing carbon footprints. We're not talking advice to change your bulbs to CF. These posts focus on the bigger picture of green -- what's happening across the pond, and let me tell you it should embarrass us.

(Both links go to Greener than Money posts.)

Sweden to phase out oil based economy. Woot!

Sweden announced that they aim to be the first oil-free country by the year 2020.
Abu Dhabi to become ZERO EMISSION city
They have decided to start a BILLION dollar project creating a 6 kilometer ultra-clean city that emits NO CARBON, and NO WASTE.

Features of Abu Dhabi include wind and solar farms and the absence of cars. You've got to admire a place where the people in power are looking out for the future of the entire planet.

I mentioned that this should embarrass us, and it should. What has your town/city/state/country(!?) done to look out for our future? Tonight on PBS (just before a repeat of "Columbia's Eyelids") there was a program featuring Reynolds, Indiana, aka BioTown USA. From the site:
The long term expectation of the BioTown Project is to completely meet all the energy needs of Reynolds via biorenewable resources, including electricity, natural gas replacement, and vehicular fuel.

The BioTown USA site provides good background on the town. It should be a model for any town geographically capable of supporting it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for linking me, your blog is great.

Anonymous said...

they cant completely phase out oil, they still need it for plastics, etc.

If you really want to see why all of these countries are converting to other power sources, why ethanol is gaining popularity... google for 'peak oil'

the world is running out of oil.