A small elementary school in Stropones village, mountainous Euboea, cannot afford to pay for heating expenses this year: an old building, really drafty, with its heating oil requirements above its annual budget, leaving kids between the ages of 4-12 to freeze in their classrooms.

This school represents the Greek reality: highly inefficient buildings, expensive heating oil, lack of money and a massive increase in dangerous toxic smog from the wood stoves and fireplaces burning everything: from furniture to chopped down trees, some illegally cut from protected forests. These form a grim reality in which households are asked to give out as much as 70% of their income to heat their homes. To make matters worse, the Greek government helps perpetuate energy poverty and lets billions of euros of European and Greek tax payers money to flee the country in oil imports by promoting irrelevant investments (e.g. planning to build new lignite power plants) while offering a small ‘oil-heating allowance’.

There is only one solution.

In every crisis there is an opportunity. A large scale energy efficiency programme can provide alleviation to people’s most urgent needs and kick-start a decentralized economic recovery for the country. It is a solution that is feasible, maximizes the added value for the economy and the society and is permanent. It can solve the problem once and for all.

As it gets colder, Greece is bracing for another winter in austerity and Greeks are yet again left energy vulnerable. That’s why Greenpeace is urgently calling people all around the world on immediate action, by joining their crowdfunding project and raise the needed money that will fund the insulation of this elementary school in Euboea. This energy upgrade will be showcased as an example of what needs to happen in order to stop this vicious circle of oil that keeps the country stuck in the past.

“Until now society tolerated the perpetuation of the problem. No more. Civil society now takes action and leads the way. Instead of subsidizing the oil industry and losing millions of euros each year in energy imports, we choose to invest in a modern and competitive economy free of energy poverty. The government will have to follow us in the future if it doesn’t want to stay in a past full of failed policies, rising debts and social misery,” said Takis Grigoriou, Greenpeace Greece Climate and Energy Campaigner.

Some of the basic interventions in that school will be:

• Heat (external) insulation
• Replacement of frames and glass panes with new highly efficient ones
• Replacement of the oil boiler with a new, state of the art, biomass pellet boiler

Join the crowdfunding project at www.sxoleiomas.org/eng