Lifestyle + Travel Booking

By Peter Myers

Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning by George Monbiot

By now, most of us are beginning to clock-on that if the planet’s carbon-emitting trends continue, a climate shift similar to that which wiped out the dinosaurs will likely occur. Heat identifies itself as a ‘manifesto of action’, a ‘thought experiment’ to stop this from happening.

Those of us who altruistically indulge in composting, recycling and cycling to work have cause to question how worthwhile our efforts are – it’s not enough if everyone elseis polluting away happily. So Heat becomes a call to take our governments to account, to make our leaders regulate and sanction us. George Monbiot, columnist and environmental activist, in a surprisingly optimistic vein, shows how it is possible to stymie home, retail and transport emissions to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 60% (the rich nations need a 90% reduction) while retaining the global economy as we know it.

Economists predict we will be ten times richer in 2100 than we were in 2000. If the climate bill is spread over time, we wouldn’t be affected. We’d just be ten times richer in, say, 2102. Monbiot reminds us that “No one’s bank account is emptied by what might have been.” Consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers concluded in October ’06 that it would take just one year’s economic growth over the next 40years to stave off climate doom.

Our leaders’ challenge – and it is the biggest challenge to face any government in history – is to enforce a fair, global systemof carbon rationing. But, as Monbiot asks in his chapter on The Denial Industry, which government would be brave enough to stop its voters from holidaying in Thailand? The UK government’s budget for widening the M1 motorway is GBP 3.6 billion (seven times as much as it currently spends on tackling climate change); the US government spends billions on subsidies to firms who empty our oceans, wreck our forests and carbonate our skies. The war in Iraq has been estimated to cost between USD 1 and 2 trillion so far.

Part of the problem, Monbiot explains, is that world leaders and opinion makers are, like readers of this article, professional-class types who have the most to lose by havingan identical carbon-emission-output as every other human. The woolly liberal/communist idea of being on a level carbon playing field terrifies us. But it shouldn’t do. Everyone wouldhave a ‘carbon account’: an allowance from which the purchase of fuel and electricity, or train and plane travel, is deducted.

The government, who would hold most of a country’s carbon budget, could auction some of it to companies or carbon brokers: “The entitlement to pollute will be accounted, saved, spent and exchanged much as money is today.” You can still drive around in your Rolls-Royce, but only after you’ve transferred a lot of credit to people who are less well off or more abstemious that you are.

For us travellers, Monbiot assesses numerous ways to combat motoring emissions (better-located and more aspirational public transport; not a transfer to biofuel but to hyper car technology and electric cars). But what to do about plane travel? There can be no more ‘love miles’, “… the distance you must travel to visit friends… and relatives on the other side of the planet.” Is the utopian ability to crisscross the planet at will “worth the sacrifice of the biosphere and the lives of the poor”? It is no surprise that, as Monbiot surmises, we ‘ethical travellers’ are in deep denial about air travel. And this is only set to increase as countries all over the world battle to max-out aviation capacity. There seems to be no high-tech fix for now, and Monbiot resorts to assessing the potential of transferring passengers to fairly-high-speed electric trains, and even waxes lyrical about airships.

Unfortunately, to stop the world burning,the only possible solution for the tiny percentage of the world’s population who currently can afford to fly is to forget about distant-land holidays (unless you’re prepared to set aside many days to get there and back) and celebrate video-conferencing.

Other chapters in Heat cover the retail industry; home installation (two percent of our electricity is wasted when our equipment is on standby; that’s one million tonnes of UK carbon emissions a year); nuclear power (better for the environment but a political quagmire); renewable energies (wind, waves and sun won’t run out as long as we’re around, and if renewable power plants were connected tothe national grid by long-distance DC cables, an overall reduction of 90% could be met); and the intriguing idea of an ‘energy internet’ connecting wind turbines on the continental shelf and solar power from Africa to the grid.There are very few books a reviewer feels obligated to demand his readers read; this is one of them. My only criticisms of Heat is that it is too UK-centric, and I wonder if the author’s optimism takes into account the fact that our fragmented world is full of bigots, conflicts, despots, the religious right who say everything will be OK because god won’t let the planet burn, and greedy corporations,like Exxon Mobil, the world’s most profitable company, which has been shown to spend millions of dollars funding a wide variety of academic bodies, lobby groups, websites and think-tanks to create doubt about climate change. It is this reviewer’s opinion that we’re not quite sophisticated, smart, or together enough to solve the toxic products of our industrial development. But the world is changing because of human progress – and Heat will be one of many new titles asking whether we are willing to let individual, national and corporate greed heat the planet to its doom.