The Shirt Project

Who Loves The Sun?

Saturday Feb 16 2008

As the world’s oil supply dwindles and roving clouds of smog threaten cities across the world, the dire need for clean, alternative sources of power has attracted everyone’s attention. Pick up any newspaper and you’re guaranteed to find a story covering at least one facet of this trend. What’s often overlooked is the fact that almost all forces harvested for renewable power are downstream outlets of one primary energy source. So who loves the sun? It’s time we paid some attention to it, because if we could catch just a crumb of that pie in the sky we would have all our energy needs taken care of.

Named after a Velvet Underground song, this spiffy lemon-yellow shirt visualizes the disparity between how much energy comes from the sun and how little we actually use. The surface area of the entire shirt gives a rough approximate of energy that hits the Earth from the sun. A pair of tiny dots on the front represent total global energy consumption and total renewable energy consumption. These dramatic proportions illustrate just how far Earth has to go to make use of the resources available all around it.