Dreaming the end of our own Stone Age

Master stonemasons built a masterpiece of stone in the form of Lund's Domkyrka cathedral

The following quote is a cathedral of thought, and one of the most inspiring sentiments I've come across in a long, long time:

“The Stone Age did not come to an end because we had a lack of stones . . .”

                                                    Ahmed Zaki Yamani, regarding our apparent addiction to fossil fuels

Before leaving you to reflect on Ahmed Zaki Yamani's stroke of genius, I have to point you to an excellent New York Times article that shows some of the complexity of leaving our own version of the Stone Age. The article treats the topic of some of my earlier posts on wind power (see my list of labels). As the New York Times article describes so well, the politics of striding towards alternative futures is not so simple, and full of ironies. Check out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/science/earth/denmark-aims-for-100-percent-renewable-energy.html?_r=0

More on this in my next post! Turn a stone . . .

Symbiotic cities

As everybody knows, the human race is going urban. In every single country in the world, more than 50% of the population lives in cities. That is expected to increase to more than 70% in the next 30-40 years. What we do with our cities has a lot to do with climate change, both how we respond to it and how we affect it. Thinking of cities as dynamic ecosystems is not new, but it is increasingly promising, and relevant. A new Swedish national initiative, "SymbioCity: Sustainability by Sweden," was launched at the beginning of 2013. It is a collaboration between the Swedish Government, Business Sweden and the international affiliate of the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, SKL International. The idea is to create and nurture symbiosis in the design and running of cities, all around the world. Their impressive website is a gold mine of resources, ideas, tool kits, contacts and, above all, inspiration. They are doing things. They are open, inclusive and sharing. Go there and explore the possibilities.

Mainstreaming is not headline news

Right in the mainstream--coping with winter, nationally and locally, Öresund

There's not much about climate change response in Sweden that's exciting and attention-grabbing these days. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, since it seems that the more headlines there are about climate change at the global level, the fewer there are in the Swedish press, about what's happening in this country. Entire weeks can go by with scarcely a mention in any of the half-dozen or so larger newspapers of any Swedish climate change-related activity. To know if there's anything going on, you've got to do a lot of sleuthing. My theory is that this is because responding to climate change is gradually becoming mainstreamed here. I'm not sure yet if this is the best way to go about it, but it does help to explain the lack of media coverage. Climate change is just part of everyday business . . . maybe.

Believe it or not, but one of the coolest places to see innovative thinking about climate change is deep inside the Swedish bureaucracy, in one of the least trendy-seeming places. It's not at the Swedish EPA (Naturvårdsverket), for instance, nor at the Swedish Met Office (SMHI), nor even at the Ministry of Environment, all of which have admirable programs underway, as you would expect. No, this nest of real solid work on societal aspects of climate change is Boverket, The Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning. I'll be describing some of their activities in the coming weeks, but one of their more recent achievements has been the result of a massive exercise in producing a Vision for Sweden 2025, which the Government commissioned from them. The defining objective for the vision is a society guided by sustainable development, and based on the over hundred goals, from national to local level, that have been defined for the country's physical societal planning. The resulting Vision was released, as a "web app," with a surprising lack of media attention and undeserved modesty, on December 12, barely a week ago. The Vision poses four megatrends, of which climate change is one. Since so far the whole thing is only in Swedish, I'll be telling more about it in coming posts. Stay tuned (and Visionary!)

Eons ago, the world's biggest wind turbine

It's now more than twenty-five years since the biggest wind turbine in the world, at that time, was spinning in . . . can you guess where? Denmark? The USA? China? Spain? Germany?

Nope. Sweden. Outside the tiny hamlet of Maglarp, on the southern tip of this Nordic country, the WTS 3, was built by Wind Turbine Systems, which was part of the Swedish state-owned Swedyard Group of Ship Yards. It was one of a half-dozen or so research prototypes built mainly in the 1980s. It was designed to generate 3 MW of electricity, but often produced more. I remember visiting it, where it stood all by itself in the middle of a grain field, just a few kilometres from the seashore, and it was huge. I was flabbergasted that the equivalent of a Boeing 747's wingspan was sitting up there on its tower, spinning it's two enormous blades in the wind. Yes, it had only two blades, and it had a lot of problems; its designers learned a lot, but went on to other things. Along with most of the rest of its tiny family of wind turbines, it was dismantled in the mid-1990s, and wind power faded mostly away from Sweden for most of the next ten years. That was an institutionalized, state-run failure, with little support from the high-tech nuclear power industry that was flourishing in Sweden.

Anyone travelling on the other side of the strait in nearby Denmark during those years had a hard time missing the hundreds of wind power generators that were sprouting up everywhere. Most of them seemed to have the name Vestas on the sides of their nacelles. That was a grassroots private start-up, the result of dozens of small-scale ventures.

Today, Sweden's nuclear program faces an uncertain future. But you can see hundreds of wind turbines sprouting up across the countryside here, too. Most of them seem to have the name Vestas on their nacelles.

The company that built the Maglarp wonder-of-the-world has now been bought by the German company, E.ON. In the last week, E.ON announced that it was moving its northern-European headquarters for land-based wind power, to Malmö, only a short distance from Maglarp. There's a lot to do here.

Foundations for the new offshore wind farm being built by E.ON off Kårehamn, Öland, Sweden (Photo credit here)