Unemployment and poverty could easily be eliminated. (There are none in the Israeli Kibbutz settlements.) We would have neighbourhood work coordination committees who would make sure that all who wanted work had a share of the work that needed doing. Far less work would need to be done than at present. (In our present society […]

The biggest and most difficult changes will have to be in values and outlooks. The foregoing changes in lifestyles, economy, geography, agriculture and politics cannot work unless people think and act according to some quite different attitudes and habits compared to those dominant today. It is not possible to design a sustainable and just society […]

It should be evident now that a meaningful discussion of the role of renewable energy in the alternative, sustainable society could not have been undertaken effec­tively before giving the foregoing account of the global predicament and thus of the radically different general form the new society must take. Those prerequisites establish the need for great […]

It would be very easy to establish and run The Simpler Way – if that was what we wanted to do. It does not involve complicated technology and it does not require solutions to difficult technical problems, such as how to get a fusion reactor to work. lt does not require vast bureaucracies or huge […]

The first thing everyone can do is to talk about these issues as much as possible. We urgently need to get the limits analysis of our situation and the desirability of The Simpler Way onto the agenda of public attention. But the most effective contribution will be to initiate in our localities some of the […]

From the European Wind Energy Atlas (1991) it can be estimated that Europe, excluding Scandinavia probably has 450,000 square km of land with 6.5 m/s or bet­ter average wind speed. (However Grubb and Meyer, 1993, p. 193-4, indicate a much lower figure for good European wind area; 90,000 square km of Class 6 wind.) If […]

As societies become richer, people demand more air conditioning and this is caus­ing a major headache for electricity suppliers. On the very few days of the year when air conditioning demand goes through the roof, supply capacity might have to be some 20% greater than the level of demand most of the time. In Australia […]

The most important factor determining the winter/summer difference in trough per­formance would seem to involve the “threshold intensity” needed for system start­up. As soon as a PV panel begins to receive weak sunlight it will generate some electricity. But until the energy delivered by the solar thermal plant’s reflectors reaches a specific level the turbines […]