Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, George Monbiot
Published by Doubleday Canada, October 17, 2006, 304pp.

These are hard days, but thrilling. They're difficult, and scary, because for the first time we're coming to understand that things are worse than we thought, and the time we have to act on climate change should perhaps be measured in years, not decades. They're exciting because we're beginning to see paths forward that could lead us out of this catastrophe and into a better future: they're still faint, and we're far from home and night is not far off, but they do exist.

George Monbiot's new book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning , is, at its core, a personal quest to find such a path. Indeed, Monbiot fairly declares that he was prompted to write the book in part because of a member of the audience at one of his talks in which he had declared the need for an 80 percent reduction in carbon asked him "When you get your 80 percent cut, what will this country look like?"

In actuality, he discovers, many scientists are now arguing that the developed world probably needs to cut its climate-changing emissions by 90 percent by 2030, if we are to avoid runaway catastrophic climate change. "This is the task whose feasibility Heat attempts to demonstrate."

Heat is part of a new generation of climate change books, ones which are more interested with debating what we should do about global warming than whether or not it exists.

It's a good book, and worth reading. Monbiot has some extremely annoying tics -- a tendency to call ideas which are already well-debated his, a certain parochial view of the nature of modern life which probably describes well life in the UK but completely misses the mark for various reasons in other places, a certain scolding leftier-than-thou vibe, a disdain for technology -- but he also does a fine job of pulling together some good thinking about how we might go about radical carbon-cutting.

His book begins with explanations of the climate crisis and the denialist lobby, both of which are frankly covered better elsewhere (go see An Inconvenient Truth if you're looking to catch up). It's the practical solutions he offers -- or, more accurately, the practical solutions he compiles -- that make the book worth reading.

He then takes on housing, arguing, as do many (including us) that changing the way we build homes is vital ("Houses which meet the building codes in Norway and Sweden use around one quarter of the energy of houses meeting the standards in England..."); describes the basics of BedZED; notes that Germany's conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced a program to retrofit five percent of the houses in the country to the currently accepted energy standards every year for the next twenty years (at which point Germany's entire housing stock will be energy-efficient); and points out that in Japan the government routinely demands that all available appliances reach the currently best standard of efficiency within a certain time frame.

From housing, he moves to power generation, where he argues that we can by 2030 reduce by half the amount of carbon we spew in order to generate the power we need (or at least that this is true in the UK). He is somewhat too pessimistic about the potential of renewable energy (and more or less completely ignores the possibility of breakthrough technologies, like nanosolar) and a little too obsessed with intermittancy, which many researchers believe can be overcome with the right portfolio of investments, and he is entirely too sanguine about the potential of CO2 sequestration, in my opinion. But, none the less, his explorations of wind, solar, biomass, solar thermal and ground source heat pumps are worth the time spent.

In terms of power generation, Monboit argues that we can reduce by 2030 half the amount of carbon we spew in order to generate the power we need.

Where Monbiot goes off the rail is when he describes
his plan for the "energy internet" -- otherwise known as smart grids, a model being already explored and developed by many people. He's bully on the technologies, but many of his assessments of the potential for distributed energy, combined heat and power systems, smart metering and the like differ radically from those of people actually working in the
field whose opinions I trust.

His transport chapter, too, is a bit of a let down, proclaiming as new many proposals worldchanging folks around the world are already deploying, from bus rapid transit to technology-empowered hitchhiking. More (and more oddly), he seems to not understand the very well-proven tenets of transit-oriented development or access-by-proximity: indeed, he seems to be against compact development.

We've already shared his views on airplanes.

His chapter on retailing, on the other hand, while nothing new, is engaging and smartly-argued. He explains, in great detail and with much insight, how the average contemporary retail store is an ecological nightmare (even before you consider the supply chain that keeps it in business), noting that the average UK retail store uses 275 kilowatt hours per square meter, whereas local government offices use only 39. Most of this energy use goes to stage-quality lighting, open refrigerators, and the like. Monbiot fails to see these as perhaps solvable design challenges, but he does recognize that much retail shopping is amenable to redefinition as a product-service system: communication technologies and intelligent delivery systems could help substantially reduce the footprint of the retail industry (though I suspect that certain forms of shopping are unlikely ever to be amenable to dematerialization: we will probably always want to squeeze our veggies and try on our new shoes...).

Perhaps the most controversial part of Heat is its utter dismissal of offsetting as part of the solution, given that money raised by carbon offsets, rightly employed, can fund all sorts of climate-balancing activities.

Perhaps the most controversial part of Heat is its utter dismissal of offsetting as part of the solution ("Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression you have eaten it."). I've been a critic of the idea that casual offsetting can solve climate problems, myself, but I think Monbiot is merely rattling an ideological saber here. Given that money raised by carbon offsets, rightly employed, can fund all sorts of climate-balancing activities -- from the raising of windpower turbines to the preservation of ancient forest -- that would otherwise not be pursued, this seems like short-sightedness to me.

All in all, Monbiot's made a real contribution here. Heat isn't the book to get your skeptical uncle, but it does have some good ideas and clear thinking in it.

Perhaps more importantly, it is part of a new generation of climate change books, ones which are more interested with debating what we should do about global warming than whether or not it exists, and that shift is a cool breeze on a hot day.






Book review contributed by Alex Steffen, editor of Worldchanging.com and the editor of the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams, November 2006). This review was first published on Worldchanging and is reprinted with permission from World Changing.

To read another Global Envision article about Global Warming see Global Warming Cures: Time to Harvest Ocean Power?



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