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Energy is one of today's goods. We all need it, but it is more and more expensive. The price of fossil-fuel energy will grow as it becomes scarce. Advocates of fossil fuels of course claim that this kind of energy still abounds and that it is still cheaper than the energy obtained from sustainable sources. As the mentality of the greedy part of the world is focused on consumerism, the little people have the honour to change this - for the better, contrary to what the other, big ones, do; they change it for their own good only. Take for example bio-diesel. To use it, the cars practically need not be changed in any way, which is good news for the car industry. What needs to be done is building the facilities to produce such fuel, which is a cost in itself; the big industry does see a chance to invest in this, but no one looks further. The processing needs raw material, in this case the seeds from which oil is pressed and refined. This is not bad in itself if these plants were grown on the fields which were so far used to produce food. Food production needs a lot of fossil fuel as well and is ready to invest; growing plants for bio-diesel is a bit easier than growing plants for human consumption and it is much more cost effective. The trouble is that for bio-diesel plant growing, many crop sprays are used and in higher concentrations than those used for human consumption plants. This is why growing plants for bio-diesel is interesting also for small farms. When we become aware that this means killing the earth and that we will also be left without food ... Wherever the plants for bio-diesel were planted, famine increased - regardless of continent.
What can we do therefore?
First and foremost, one can limit one's greed for energy. Every watt of consumption that is saved means one whole day of no consumption over a year. And every household can save and cut energy consumption for several 10 W.
Every farmer that owns some forest can produce enough warmth for his farm using energy saving stoves/boilers, this is something that was used by our ancestors already. And we can do even more. Wooden waste can be transformed to electric energy, as well as warmth - this is called cogeneration. The trouble is that noone deals with this on a small scale. There is one nice example in New Zealand - WhisperGen™ has produced a cogeneration machine for electricity and warmth supply. Though currently the machine uses fossil fuel but the technology used can be transformed to use sustainable sources.
But as not everyone owns forest, the question arises what is that we have. Some places have lots of sun, other places lots of wind, some people have a brook running through their plot etc. What do we need? Either lots of money OR some ingeniousness and some free time. Let's say that our household uses 6 kWh per day. Those that are more energy-saving can use less, but this is some sort of average. To produce the 6 kWh out of sun energy one needs 6 hours of sun and 4 sun panels of 250 W. In the case of wind, one needs two generators of 1.2 m doameter, these can be purchased via catalogues and are mainly produced for vessels... Mind is limitation.