English: The world is facing a climate emergency. We must reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and their export and, instead, develop renewable and efficient energy. Electrification of heating with heat pumps can radically reduce natural gas use, electrical vehicles cut the need for oil, and energy efficiency and renewable energy can help shoulder the greater demand this electrification causes, while cutting coal and natural gas use, carbon emissions and resultant climate destabilization.

Free and open source hardware design has proven to be an effective method to increase innovation and decrease costs of equipment and products over a wide range of industries. It can accelerate practical action and the implementation of policies and strategies to reduce our use of coal, oil and gas. In this presentation the power of open source will be explained to show how it can improve the performance and decrease the costs of decarbonization technologies.

This presentation will end with a description of the HardwareX special issue on Open Source Decarbonization for a Sustainable World (www.journals.elsevier.com/hardwarex/forthcoming-special-issues/special-issue-on-open-source-decarbonization-for-a-sustainable-world).

Joshua M. Pearce, Open source decarbonization for a sustainable world, Science Talks 2022, 4, 100083. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sctalk.2022.100083 academia OA