Ten steps to climate neutrality.

Saturday the 21st september 2024.

Thinking about our individual carbon footprint can be an important part of the solution to the environmental threats that we face. Of course, we also need to talk about the big climate criminals and find a transnational exit strategy for them: for BP, Shell and Exxon, for Gazprom, Aramco, China-Coal and Rio Tinto, and for the other 93 multinationals that do their business and make their money with fossil fuels and the extraction of minerals at the expense of humankind, at the expense of the habitability of our blue planet. These 100 multinationals emit 80% of the world’s CO₂. And we should also take a very close look at the State and its subsidies and tax policies and scrutinise its actions carefully. Why, for example, is one single company allowed to plant ten per cent of the country’s land with highly inflammable eucalyptus? Simply because it is a good taxpayer? Because the forest is nothing more than a simple provider of resources? Everything must be scrutinised. Including my own individual CO₂ footprint, of course. After all, I should start by cleaning up my own backyard. Where I can take responsibility for myself, for I’m not just saying that others should start reducing their CO₂ emissions. Such a statement also requires me to be transparent.

I bought a plot of land the size of a hectare (10,000 m²) at a friendly price from an old friend who told me that I absolutely needed to buy a plot of land if I wanted to stay in Portugal. That was back in the 1990s. With this piece of land that I own today, it is a little easier for me to consider the question of my own net zero emissions. If you don’t own such a plot of land, you should use the roof of your house or the balcony of your flat to produce clean solar power yourself. That would necessarily be a less complicated venture, but, as you know, every journey begins with a first step. I live in Portugal and am the editor of this magazine. I originate from Germany, where I went to school, studied and learned the profession of a journalist. Then I decided to fulfil a dream that I had had ever since my early days. I bought a sailing boat with the first fee that I received as a television director and sailed out to sea and into the wider world.

That’s how I came to Portugal: with the wind. This was as far as I got. Back then, more than 30 years ago, the climate was already changing and, with it, the winds, the weather and the sea. And, since then, I believe that we have been beating about the bush and not doing enough to improve the situation. Because, already at that time,  it seemed to me that the climate was getting warmer and warmer: the summers were getting longer and longer, and the winters shorter and shorter. It rained more irregularly, sometimes much more than before, and then less and less. But then the wind began to change direction more frequently and, instead of rain, it brought us nothing at all. Anyone born in the last 25 years has no way of comparing what we are experiencing now with the climate as it was before, especially as far as the conditions at sea are concerned. I was living on the same sailing boat that I had arrived upon, and my wife was pregnant. So, we came ashore to prepare for the birth of our child, and we were warmly welcomed by our nearest neighbour in the Monchique mountains. One morning, he brought us a gift for our new home: two buckets of food – potatoes in one bucket, tomatoes, peppers and onions in the other. What kind of friendly world had we stepped into? Portugal! We lived far away from civilisation, amid the nature of the mountains, without electricity and with running water that came from a spring. Everything seemed right with the world, our world, our new Garden of Eden.

We were soon brought back down to earth. We were hit by heavy rain, and a stream burst its banks after a thunderstorm. leaving nothing as it had been before. The orange grove, with its 60 trees, was all washed away. Within six hours, we had suffered as much as half a year’s rainfall. The mountain stream, which was normally less than 30cm deep, burst its banks and rose to a depth of six metres. The neighbours saved themselves by moving up onto the roof of their house. We were deeply shocked. The harbingers of climate change were announcing the doom that awaited us. And we were beginning to focus our attention even more intensely on the causes when the whole forest around us went up in flames the following summer. This completely changed our view of the world we lived in. What could we do about it?

The greenhouse gas effect.

From the day of that first forest fire, the idea of freeing myself from fossil fuels and no longer emitting CO₂ into the atmosphere around me, freeing myself from the evils of our energy-intensive societies, began to develop within me. This idea was immediately given a roadmap. My goal was very clearly defined: I wanted to become climate neutral, and, combined with this, was the question: how can I possibly hand over my world to my children, when it will be so much worse than the one that I inherited from my ancestors? I was concerned about nothing less than creating the conditions for a good and sustainable life on our planet. And, I wondered, can I change anything at all? So, I started with a first cautious step, because I believe in the power of small, well-considered steps, and in the fact that we have to question ourselves, every day, more and more.

Step 1: How do I become energy-independent?

I no longer buy anything from China or the Far East that I can’t buy from local, regional or national producers. Travelling short distances reduces CO₂ emissions. So, the first step is to instal at least one tracking system on your property with 20 solar modules of 430 watts each (as of 2024). I buy them, for example, from the Meyerburger company in East Germany, or directly from their headquarters in Switzerland, at https://www.meyerburger.com in Gwatt (Thun), or from the Spanish solar manufacturer Eurener in Valencia: https://eurener.com. They still exist, these last European solar panel manufacturers.

So, find out if you want to free yourself, like I did. Don’t give up, and ask your bank manager for advice. Because you want a solution: you need to find financing for your solar power system.

Around eight kilowatts of power should be enough to start with, which you can feed into the electricity grid, and then, in this way, you won’t need to buy a lithium-ion battery to store the electricity. At the same time, you can sign a mutual supply contract with a green electricity producer. For example, in Portugal, with https://cooperinco.org or, in Germany, with BürgerEnergieGenossenschaft Losheim am See: https://beg-hochwald.de and then you can sell them the electricity you produce with the solar panels. And you can also become a member (comrade) of theirs, or look for another energy cooperative in your area. Make yourself free. Become independent. You will soon understand that you are growing with this first step…

In Europe, there are more than 1,500 energy co-operatives in Spain alone. You will realise that you produce more clean electricity with 20 solar panels than you can consume yourself and you will also earn good money from this. You can use this to pay off the possible loan – for example from the GLS Bank in Bochum (Germany) – that you took out with this green bank to pay for the cost of the tracking system. Incidentally, you can also deduct the cost of the investment loan from your taxes. I’m talking about a manageable investment of around 15,000 euros. Stay alert and keep yourself informed. (https://www.gabv.org/)

When I bought my systems in 2010, almost 15 years ago, I was still paying 22,000 euros per system. I bought two tracking systems and made a sustainable investment in my own way. This shows how far the prices for solar modules have fallen in 15 years. Such a system pays for itself after around four and a half years. Then the rest can be paid off with the money you receive for the electricity feed-in. In my case, the remaining ten-year period of electricity feed-in was all profit. I was able to make good use of the income from the sale of electricity both then and now. In Portugal, you earn a pittance as a journalist (and I didn’t want to become corrupt). What’s more, I had just had to ‘repair’ another forest fire. We, the Esgravatadouro co-operative in Monchique, built a potential sprinkler system for the new forest that we are currently planting. Because the forest fire that I had experienced back then was not the only one I endured. With a lot of luck and even more experience, I have now survived five forest fires. But more about that later.

Step 2 Flying was yesterday – travelling by train is tomorrow.

Protecting nature is important to me, a matter close to my heart. Because anyone who has watched it go up in smoke and then dissolve into ashes becomes more and more sensitive every time.

When it comes to mobility, that is where your freedom really begins. It was a few years ago when I made this clear: flying on holiday or to an appointment for an interview is something that now belongs to yesterday. And, for the next few years, I resolved to simply get to know Europe – our own old continent – even better. Less is more, and, in particular, slower is healthier. Since then, I have avoided flying wherever possible.

Start thinking about how to get from Portugal to Norway without petrol, diesel or paraffin. I had to travel to Norway to do an interview. I just have to tell you this story because it’s a good example of a critical approach to the topic of zero emissions.

On 1 August 2018, I wanted to have a conversation with the famous psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes from the Club of Rome about his still extremely important book entitled “What do we think about when we try not to think about Global Warming”. So, I got on the TVE express train in Huelva, the first Spanish railway station after Portugal, and off I went at speeds of up to 320 km/h via Madrid and Barcelona to Girona – electric and almost emission-free, of course. I took a break and spent the night there. Shortly before eight o’clock the next morning, I boarded the TGV, which took me via Lyon to Paris, and from the Gare de L’Est on the ICE via Saarbrücken to Frankfurt and Fulda – all in a single day on the train from northern Spain to the centre of Germany. Why do I need an aeroplane, I asked myself, when I can travel by train with almost no CO₂ emissions?

Then, I freely admit, things became a little difficult. In the meantime, we were all well aware of Deutsche Bahn’s problems. I was still on time from Fulda via Hanover to Hamburg. But getting from there to Gothenburg via Copenhagen was difficult because the train from Hamburg refused to budge. It had broken down. I waited for hours for a replacement train to be provided. If you’ve lived in Portugal for as many years as I have, waiting is no longer a problem. The new train arrived at some time in the afternoon, but instead of arriving in Sweden at five o’clock in the afternoon, I didn’t get to Gothenburg until two in the morning. On the fourth day, I travelled from Gothenburg to Oslo at midday and it only took four hours. Despite all that time on a train, I never got bored. Either the scenery was breathtaking – for example, taking the train onto a ferry and sailing across the Baltic Sea – or I found fellow travellers in the compartment with whom I could swap exciting stories. I am a journalist, speak three languages, and now make more time in my life for myself and for others in conversations, because I am quite sure that I want to avoid CO₂ emissions and also because I can. The issue of no longer burning fossil fuels has become the top priority in my life. Everything else is now secondary. My internal clock slowed down. I had stopped taking part in the rat race of spinning on a wheel like a hamster. I slowed down and became more alert: I used my imagination.

During the whole of my train journey, almost 4,500 kilometres long, I only emitted 160 kg of CO₂. I did the maths with the various CO₂ calculators: I would have emitted more than ten times that amount by plane. I was travelling to Norway for three and a half days.

After that, I took a day for the interview and, a day later, I made my way home again. The trip there and back cost me a whole 220 euros with an Interrail ticket, plus 80 euros for seat reservations. Rarely have I felt as comfortable as I did on that train journey – travelling with time and not against the clock. On the way back, I heard the news at the station in Copenhagen that the forest back home in Portugal, in Monchique, was on fire again. A eucalyptus tree had touched a high-voltage power line and sparks had ignited the forest to the north of Monchique at temperatures of 44º Celsius. Man-made climate change had struck again, and human negligence had done the rest…

Nowadays, if I have to drive from Monchique in the south of Portugal, where I live, to Lisbon or Porto because I want to do an interview there, or if I travel from Cologne to Minden in Westphalia by train, I know my emission values pretty accurately. For local and regional destinations, I’ve been using an electric car since 2016, which I can charge with electricity from my own solar power system, and it’s even free. Mobility for free! Neither the sheikhs nor Vladimir Putin will receive a single cent more from me. And you don’t even have to travel; you can also do it via ZOOM.

In Portugal, a local journalist earns very little money. You have to double your wages in euros before you can spend them. But, in Portugal, the sun shines 300 days a year – for free. And since, in 2010, I had set myself the goal of becoming climate-neutral by 2025, I thought carefully about how I was going to do this, where exactly I was going to start and where I was going to end up. In the middle of the period – i.e. at the end of 2015 – I scrapped my petrol car and finally saved enough money to buy an electric car with government support at the beginning of 2016. In just under ten years, I have driven 125,000 kilometres without any CO₂ emissions and saved more than 20,000 euros in petrol. Because the question of ecology is always also a question of economy.

Uwe Heitkamp (64)

trained TV journalist, book author and hobby botanist, father of two grown-up children, knows Portugal for 30 years, founder of ECO123. Translations: Dina Adão, John Elliot,  Patrícia Lara
Photos: Uwe Heitkamp

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