The 2 Degree Life—What You Can Do to Stop Climate Change

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,665685,00.html

12/08/2009 03:43 PM

The 2 Degree Life

What You Can Do to Stop Climate Change

By SPIEGEL Staff

Earth's temperature will continue to rise in the long term if politicians are unable to reach a global agreement on climate protection. But people also need to be asking themselves: Could a new way of life in Europe help prevent a catastrophe?

Editor's note: This week the United National Climate Change Conference began in Copenhagen. World leaders are seeking a common path to limit global warming. Most climate researchers are united in their belief that any increase of the planet's temperature over 2 degrees in the coming years would have disastrous consequences. In the first of a three-part series, SPIEGEL describes what the politicians and citizens of Europe can do to help keep climate change at bay. This is the first installment of a two-part initial story in the series. Read the second part http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,665771,00.html">here.

Georg Fürtges's pride and joy is a green monstrosity standing in the basement of his house in the western German city of Essen, hissing quietly and consuming dark little pellets that look like worms. The pellets, stored in bins reaching up to the ceiling in another room, are made of compressed sawdust. And the monstrosity is a furnace that is at least three times as big as a modern condensing gas boiler. Fürtges, 55, and his wife Karla, 49, have 6.4 tons of the pellets stored in their basement, enough to meet their heating needs for a year and a half. The couple has decided to live in an environmentally friendly way.

They have been doing so for more than 20 years, partly because they have three children and are thinking ahead, beyond their own life spans. They have made mistakes, but they have also learned a lot. They remain convinced that their approach is the right one, but they also know that a life devoted to living green can only be had at a high price. Georg Fürtges spent an entire year researching heating systems before he recently replaced his old gas furnace with a pellet furnace combined with a solar thermal heating system. Some of the pipes in the house had to be replaced. All told, it cost Fürtges €27,000 ($40,200) to retrofit his home. He would have paid about €10,000 for a modern gas furnace.

"We believe that it will pay off in the long term," says Karla Fürtges. The couple bought their small 1930s house in Stadtwald, an Essen neighborhood, 16 years ago. The heating system was old, the windows weren't insulated and the house lacked effective heat insulation.

The couple began by insulating the outside walls. Then they purchased the costly new gas furnace and had vinyl thermopane windows installed. The insulation alone brought down their annual natural gas consumption from 22,000 to 12,000 kilowatt hours. An average household currently consumes almost twice as much gas.

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[Blue_Tires]

1. thanks for this...

if you feel bold, you may try posting it in GD as well...

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. Done

(Along with its companion…)

[Bitwit1234]

2. This is what you can't understand

just because we are having blizzards and more snow doesn't mean that there is not global warming. And people like the dried up prune Inohfe know that. Real climate change IS more and severe storms, the jet stream bringing freezing weather farther south. Temperatures rising, coastal areas being flooded. The people who pooh pooh this are only doing it because they don't want regulations to be levied on the companies etc that are causing this. And I have come to the conclusion that they can't see what is happing in the Attic they don't have the sense to be in office and should be kicked out. OR better make them all take a tour of the Attic and then come back and write just one hundred words to explain what is happening there.