The latest edition of the Guardian Weekly, out tomorrow, includes an energy supplement, subtitled "fuelling the future". It started life some months ago under the title of "environment", but it quickly became evident that was too broad a subject. How, in eight pages, could you cover the entire state of the planet's health? So the subject was narrowed.
I contacted the Guardian's environment editor, John Vidal, and asked him a series of big questions: how much energy is produced in the world today, how much will we need in a couple of decades' time (given the rampant economic growth in India and China), and how are we going to get it? This was the result (PDF,196k), and now the centrepiece of the supplement.
The rest was sourced in the manner of most of the rest of the Guardian Weekly. We have the delightful task of selecting the "best" of the Guardian, Observer, Washington Post and Le Monde, those stories of greatest interest to a diverse, educated, international audience, and bringing them together each week. But many great pieces just can't be fitted in, so for the supplement I was able to choose from a range of articles that looked at how companies, communities and individuals are dealing with the problems that John had identified.
So the supplement goes to Cornwall to visit Penryn, where the Jubilee Wharf development has led the way with what may be the greenest buildings in Britain. It then travels to Sri Lanka to look at two low-tech solutions for local needs: a single wind-turbine whose output is equitably and freely shared between an entire village, and biogas digesters that have transformed the lives of women now cooking with clean, environmentally friendly gas.
At the other end of the development scale, Andrew Clark explores the claims of America's retail beast, Wal-Mart, to have "gone green" - do two stores that get 8% of their power from the wind and collect run-off for irrigation really do the job? And Terry Slavin of the Observer looks at individuals in the West who are more than pulling their weight in cutting their own energy consumption, and how any individual can work out just how much they are contributing to the cooking of the earth.
All of these conclusions will be shared not just with our regular readership of some 200,000, but with 2,000 readers who might have some professional impact on these questions: the attendees at the Environment: Survival and Sustainability conference in Cyprus later this month, who'll be receiving a copy in their conference pack. Hopefully they'll take note of John's bottom-line figure, that the 10 billion people expected to be alive in 2050 will, on current trends, need twice the world's current energy supply.
