17 Days - Could We Survive Without Electricity?

Our season of power outages here in our little island community has begun. Winter's high winds bring branches crashing down on power lines, and we all get to experience Earth Hour for hours (and sometimes days) on end ... bringing with it an appreciation of both electricity itself and the silence of a world without that constant hum.

It was interesting for me this morning to realize that I couldn't get up and blog. (Since I started last spring, this is my first winter of blogging.) "Now, what is it that people with no power do?" I asked myself. "Especially when they don't know how to knit?"

So, on this dark, wet and windy day, I sat by candlelight and wrote a letter to my brother and sister. On paper. With a pen. I haven't done that in years. Then I read, again with the candle's light helping what little daylight the day offered, the introduction of a new vegan cookbook.

Anyway, since it's already time to write tomorrow's blog and the wind has come up again, I'll leave you with this thought: Could we survive without electricity? No, probably not. Perhaps you could, and I could (I was a Girl Guide), but there are masses of people in the developed world who simply would not know how to survive.

So why aren't we making the switch to renewably-produced electricity sooner rather than too late, when we might have to shut down all fossil-fuelled power plants as an emergency climate change mitigation measure?