Could a new way of life in Europe help prevent a catastrophe?
Editor’s note: This week the United National Climate Change Conference began in Copenhagen. World leaders are seeking a common path to limit global warming. Most climate researchers are united in their belief that any increase of the planet’s temperature over 2 degrees in the coming years would have disastrous consequences. In the first of a three-part series, SPIEGEL describes what the politicians and citizens of Europe can do to help keep climate change at bay. This is the first installment of a two-part initial story in the series. Read the second part here. Georg Frtges’s pride and joy is a green monstrosity standing in the basement of his house in the western German city of Essen, hissing quietly and consuming dark little pellets that look like worms. The pellets, stored in bins reaching up to the ceiling in another room, are made of compressed sawdust. And the monstrosity is a furnace that is at least three times as big as a modern condensing gas boiler. Frtges, 55, and his wife
