The Cure for our Planet's Fever
Monbiot Offers a Prescription in 'Heat'
A review of George Monbiot's book on how to curb global warming
A guiding principle in investigative journalism has long been "Follow the money." In the quest to pinpoint the key causes of global warming and reduce their impact on our planet, though, George Monbiot, a columnist for the Guardian in the U.K., employs a more effective guide: "Follow the carbon."
The result is "Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning" (2006, Doubleday Canada), possibly the most important book written on the subject of global warming. That's because Monbiot does what no other popular author yet has done to determine the best solution to global warming: take the actual carbon emissions from each of the major sectors of our economy and then, working from the scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas concentrations must be stabilized starting now to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius, calculate by how much each sector must cut its carbon production.
Monbiot doesn't stop there, however. He then painstakingly assesses all possible ways in which, using currently available technology, each sector can achieve the necessary reductions. Amazingly, he succeeds in almost every case. He acknowledges, though, that the resulting action plans won't be easy to swallow.
"(C)hanges of the kind I advocate in his book cannot take place without constraints which apply to everyone, rather than to everyone else," Monbiot writes. "I am sorry to say that only regulation -- that deeply unfashionable idea -- can quell the destruction wrought by the god we serve, the god of our own appetites. Manmade global warming cannot be restrained unless we persuade the government to force us to change the way we live."
Through a winding course of intellectual acrobatics that are at times simultaneously eye-popping and exhausting, Monbiot outlines exactly how -- with the help of rationing, improved energy efficiency, alternative energy sources and modern technological advances -- we can maintain a comfortable, sustainable, though radically altered, level of civilization that would enable us to stave off the worst effects of global warming: the collapse of major ecosystems around the world.
There is only one area in which Monbiot admits defeat: air travel. There is no combination of alternative fuels and technologies, he concludes, that would enable the air industry to continue as is while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent.
"(I)t has become plain to me that long-distance travel, high speed and the curtailment of climate change are not compatible," Monbiot writes. "If you fly, you destroy other people's lives."
In the end, Monbiot advises, the solution to global warming is radical, difficult, even painful at times ... but doable. Whether it will be done, though, is another matter.
"I have sought to demonstrate that the necessary reduction in carbon emissions is -- if difficult -- technically and economically possible. I have not demonstrated that it is politically possible," he writes. The only way it can become so, he adds, is for us to demand the changes necessary, which puts us in an strange position:
"(T)he campaign against climate change is an odd one," Monbiot concludes. "Unlike almost all the public protests which have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves."
