What does the ‘e’ in solar-e mean?
Garry Baverstock
Co-Founder & Director, solar-e.com
Email: g.baverstock@solar-e.com
The ‘e’ usually means e-commerce on the Internet. It represents the primary goal in establishing the website over 10 years ago. However, true sustainability of this planet in addressing the threat of devastating climate change makes this ‘e’ more cognitive to the ‘e’ in enlightenment and the ‘e’ in solar economy.
It has been obvious to the founders and current management of the site that to solve the dramatic challenges ahead in the 21st century, we all need to move from a fossil fuel economy to a solar-based economy. Hermann Scheer wrote about this in the late 1990s and there have been many calls from scientists and enlightened political figures such as Al Gore, to act in a way that produces solutions.
The website is therefore focused to create enlightened self interests for those who engage with solar-e and create more ethical products and systems that enable more solar energy to be used in our lives.
For a modern economy to create a sustainable world we need more than ever, innovators and business minds need to work out diverse ways that we can use solar energy to restore a thermal balance on planet earth. Hopefully, in doing so we will allow future generations to enjoy life as we are living today.
It is obvious people and communities need to take action. Waiting for the political systems throughout the world will mean too little too late. How soon do people seem to have forgotten the lessons of history. The socioeconomic causes of WWI and WWII were the result of the failure of governments to adapt to technological changes and population growth. Business as usual stopped working and political networking proved inadequate to prepare the populous for the changes in thinking to keep the peace.
We all need to take responsibility and action ourselves. In doing so, such action will help to gently push governments to keep pace with the changes we all need to keep the peace on planet Earth, while creating an ecologically sustainable global environment.
The directors, managers and experts involved with solar-e will be clearly defining the reasons why we desperately need a solar economy by starting to act not with the usual self-interest common to all mankind, but enlightened self interest.