APRIL/MAY 1019 • CHATELAINE 21
T
o catch a glimpse of our brightest future, I travelled to
the small Danish island of Bornholm. It was the sum-
mer of 2013, and for years I had been hunting out newand emerging climate change solutions. Climate change had
long been a focus of my writing, but after the birth of my first
child in 2005, I decided to report exclusively on the tools being
forged to overcome the problem—the world’s best experiments
in clean power and green living, little oases of hope on a dark-
ening planet. I knew the world my kids would inherit would by
necessity operate very differently from the one I’d grown up in,
and I wanted to see the tools they would need to thrive in it. And
on Bornholm, perhaps more than anywhere else on earth, all
those small slivers of a better future had been assembled into
something close to a coherent whole.
Bornholm was a test site for an energy pilot project thatbrought together the best minds and latest technology from
the Danish Energy Agency, the Technical University of
Denmark, Siemens and IBM. The majority of the island’s
power already came from the wind, and 1,900 homes and
businesses were now strung together by a smart electricity
grid that allowed household appliances to talk to the grid and
make better decisions about when to do their refrigerating
and heating and washing to maximize efficiency and mini-
mize the cost of the power used in doing so. There was also a
fleet of electric vehicles deployed across the island by the local
government to determine their ability to serve as a widely
distributed battery packs for the wind energy generated from
unpredictable Baltic Sea breezes.
Here was a vision for 21st-century living at least as inviting as
the one that had enticed so many millions of us since the mid-
dle of the 20th century to live in single-family homes with two-
car garages on wide, curving streets. Imagine your electric car
parked next to your solar-panelled house, fuelling up at night,
when demand is low and prices are cheap. Imagine driving to
work, plugging the car’s battery pack back into the grid and bro-
kering the sale of any power you don’t need at a profit as demand
rises during the day. Imagine an enviable quality of life, all with-
out a single molecule of carbon dioxide sent skyward to com-
pound the global catastrophe of climate change.
I didn’t have to imagine it anymore. It was all there on
B or nholm. I spent the day touring the island in a rental elec-
tric car, checking out solar-roofed homes and wind turbines
and charging stations. In truth, though, you could barely see
how revolutionary it all was. Tidy Danish life went on mostly
as before. A brighter, emissions-free future was upon us, seam-
lessly integrated into the world as it already was.
The trouble, of course, is that Bornholm remains a bit of an
oasis, even within green-minded Denmark. And Denmark, with
its steadily shrinking emissions, remains very much an anom-
aly in a world that’s still as dependent on fossil fuels as it was
that day in 2013. The crisis already seemed imminent then—a
massive, looming worry. It is fully manifest now—a mountingThe future is greener
than you think
It’s easy to despair about the state of the planet. But after years of
reporting on the environment, I’m more optimistic than ever. Here’s why
By CHRIS TURNERPaper illustration by DANA SLIJBOOM