Kris de Decker: Ecotech myths and lessons from the past [EN]

The present-day approach towards a sustainable society is doomed to fail. The focus on sophisticated technology - electric and hybrid cars, energy-efficient devices, solar panels and wind turbines, for instance - has little or no effect because these green technologies require large amounts of energy and resources for their manufacture, which makes their development highly dependent on a continuous supply of fossil fuels. Moreover, the manufacture of "green tech" or "clean tech" often produces toxic substances, while the dependence on rare earth metals prevents a deployment on a large enough scale. And while energy-efficient devices can be a boon for economic growth, they almost never bring energy savings.

What we need to solve our problems is exactly the opposite: less sophisticated technology. There is a lot to learn from the past. All machines and devices developed before 1850 were independent of fossil fuels for both their operation and manufacture. While they often worked surprisingly good, most of these low-tech solutions have been completely forgotten. Reverting to past technologies does not mean that we should go back to the Middle Ages. Rather, it means combining old tech with new knowledge and new materials, or applying old concepts and lost knowledge to modern technology. I will give several examples of this approach, ranging from cars that hardly consume any fuel to a solution for the intermittency of renewable energy sources.