Great Information on Reducing Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

books:

	• Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning George Monbiot South End Press, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Can't stop talking about it.

George Monblot brings together the research (encouraging and discouraging) about many sources of energy including: oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, helium, tidal, gravity, biofuels, passive houses. He is extremely readable to anyone with a general understanding of science and a curiosity for these matters. He believes that people in the western world, with the best of intentions, will not make the necessary cutbacks in personal use of fossil fuels without the incentive of government policies. He is insistent while optimistic about the future of this world. "I hope to prompt you...to force [our governments] to reverse their policies..." He speaks with passion and a wry sense of humor giving us the "how to" of saving our biosphere. "Failing all that, I have one last hope; that I might make people so depressed about the state of the planet that they stay in bed all day, thereby reducing their consumption of fosil fuels." I can't stop talking about this book.Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning

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Visionary and Practical--on the key issue of our times

Heat is a powerful, challenging and immensely useful book. It asks the hard question: What it would really take, in all the details, to shift our industrial carbon-dependent economy, in all its minute particulars, over to one that's sustainable? To do it with dramatic enough reductions of CO2 that we aren't even in the danger zone for the worst of the global warming cataclysms. And to do it in a way that is equitable for the rich nations and the poor nations, which means not just slamming the door on those just beginning to develop and saying, too bad.

I'm not certain I agree with Monbiot's every conclusion. I make my living lecturing on issues like global warming and have a certain vested interest in hoping they'll come up with a technical fix for airline travel. And he may be too harsh on the Clinton administration, though Clinton folded all too quickly once he got resistance in the Senate. But you don't need to totally agree with the book to recognize that it makes a major contribution. He looks at how we can heat our houses, travel to our work and to our friends, shop for goods we want and need, and generally maintain our twenty-first century lives, while making the radical shifts that may be necessary.

He asks the questions in a way that I haven't seen anyone else undertake. And by so doing, really helping us think through the different options. The book combines a visionary sense with hard-headed pragmatism in a way that I really admire.

Paul Loeb
Author Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time & The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear

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Great Information on Reducing Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

George Monbriot has written a great book on how to stop, or at least slow down global warming. His book does cover some of the basics on global warming, but then he goes beyond most books on the subject, and actually offers practical alternatives to reduce our energy consumption, and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Lots of great information on alternative energy and alternative ways to accomplish what we want to do, while still reducing our climate impact.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning marks an important moment in our civilization's thinking about global warming. The question is no longer Is climate change actually happening? but What do we do about it? George Monbiot offers an ambitious and far-reaching program to cut our carbon dioxide emissions to the point where the environmental scales start tipping back-away from catastrophe.

Though writing with a "spirit of optimism," Monbiot does not pretend it will be easy. The only way to avoid further devastation, he argues, is a 90% cut in CO2 emissions in the rich nations of the world by 2030. In other words, our response will have to be immediate, and it will have to be decisive.

In every case he supports his proposals with a rigorous investigation into what works, what doesn't, how much it costs, and what the problems might be. He wages war on bad ideas as energetically as he promotes good ones. And he is not afraid to attack anyone-friend or foe-whose claims are false or whose figures have been fudged.
After all, there is no time to waste. As Monbiot has said himself, "we are the last generation that can make this happen, and this is the last possible moment at which we can make it happen."

George Monbiot is the best-selling author of The Age of Consent and Captive State, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed, and No Man's Land. In 1995, Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), and East London (environmental science). Currently visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University, he writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.

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