Can we make modern health care carbon-neutral and maintain the levels of care, pain relief, and longevity that we have come to take for granted?

If the electricity for a vertical farm is supplied by solar panels, the energy production takes up at least as much space as the vertical farm saves.

As a freelance journalist – or an office worker if you wish – I have always believed that I should regularly buy a new laptop. But older machines offer more quality for much less money.

During the last months we have been working on transforming Low-tech Magazine into a multilingual publication.

The second volume features a third of the web articles published in the earlier years, carefully selected for their continued relevance and interest today.

If we build them out of wood, large wind turbines could become a textbook example of the circular economy.

As long as we keep accumulating raw materials, the closing of the material life cycle remains an illusion, even for materials that are, in principle, recyclable.

How to live a more sustainable life? By placing responsibility squarely on the individual, attention is deflected away from the many institutions involved in structuring possible courses of action.

To focus on energy efficiency is to make present ways of life non-negotiable.

Matching supply to demand at all times makes renewable power production a complex, slow, expensive and unsustainable undertaking.

More and more consumer products are controlled by networked software: what does this mean for energy demand, and exactly who is responsible for increasing consumption?

The information society promises to dematerialise society and make it more sustainable, but modern office and knowledge work has itself become a large and rapidly growing consumer of energy and other resources

The energy use of the internet can only stop growing when energy sources run out, unless we impose self-chosen limits.

Energy storage is often ignored when scientists investigate the sustainability of PV systems.

Almost all solar PV panels are now produced in China, where the electric grid is about twice as carbon-intensive and about 50% less energy efficient than in Europe.

Despite technological advancements since the Industrial Revolution, cooking remains a spectacularly inefficient process.

Automation is more energy-intensive than mechanisation.

High speed rail is destroying the most valuable alternative to the airplane; the “low speed” rail network that has been in service for decades.

The present approach to pedal power results in highly inefficient machines.

Estimates about the fuel efficiency of aircraft ignore the record of the pre-jet era.

We don’t need better batteries, we need better cars.

Increasing the share of renewable energy will not make us any less dependent on fossil fuels as long as total energy consumption keeps rising.

The embodied energy of the memory chip alone exceeds the energy consumption of a laptop during its life expectancy of 3 years.

Wind power rules, but commercially available small windmills are a swindle.

Fast recharging times generate lots of excitement, but what seems to be forgotten is that they can lead to a fabulous amount of peak demand.

A small windmill on your roof or in the garden is an attractive idea. Unfortunately, commercially available micro wind turbines deliver hardly enough energy to power a light bulb.

The high energy consumption of the mobile phone network is mainly due to the limited life span of the phones.

From an ecological point of view, the strategy to move travellers from airplanes to high speed trains just doesn’t make sense.