Heat
George Monbiot
277 pages including index
published in 2006

Thanks to the climate change camp in London held this past week, global warming is back on the news agenda again. Despite the rear guard action fought by the Exxon-Mobile sponsored climate change denial groups, the media has sort of accepted the reality of it over the past two years, but as Alex Harrowell fulminates against, it's largely treated as a consumerist, lifestyle issue:

As with most British media green pushes, there’s little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it’s a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change -- nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn’t going to work. And, again, it’s all consumer guff.

This is not something you can accuse George Monbiot of doing here. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning he quickly dismisses consumer driven solutions like the 10:10 campaign in the introduction. The entire point of the book is that we cannot solve the problem of climate change with lifestyle choices, but only through solutions that apply to everybody, not everybody else, as he puts it. He starts with the assumption that the only way to migate the consequences of global warming, as we cannot prevent it anymore, is to keep runaway climate change from happening and that can only happen if we can keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees celsius (above pre-industrial levels) in 2030. If not, major ecosystems begin collapsing as the ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide is exhausted. To keep this rise from happening we can't just switch incandencent lightbulbs for LEDs, we need to cut 90 percent of our CO2 output. The challenge Monbiot sets himself in Heat is to show that we can do this without giving up our post-industrial lifestyles, by taking the United Kingdom as his test subject and looking at various aspepcts of our lives to see how CO2 output can be reduced in them. It is not a complete blueprint for change of course and you may not necessarily agree with all his solutions, but it is a genuine attempt at putting together a national plan of action that could be implemented relatively quickly and doesn't require all of us to piss in hayboxes.

Monbiot starts Heat by examining why it is so important to limit our CO2 output that drastically, though this obviously isn't a complete scientific treatment of the subject, as well as why it has taken so long for the reality of global warming to be accepted and measures to be taken against it, thanks to the efforts of professional climate change deniers. Which is why now only drastic measures can give any succor, because so much time has been wasted having to fight this industry supported campaign. He then moves on to the question of how to get people and industry to implement the measures he proposes in the rest of the book. You could, as the 10:10 campaign does, rely on the goodwill of consumers and industry, or the government could impose energy taxes, or all sorts of regulations about energy use and CO2 output, just like e.g. the EU has just banned incandescent lightbulbs, but Monbiot goes for a more simple measure: rationing. The total amount of allowable CO2 output is divided by the number of people of the world and each country gets its own carbon budget. This is then split 40-60 between its citizens and its government, where each citizen has to use their CO2 allowance to buy fuel and electricity, with the rest of the country's budget being sold by government to industry and such. Not a simple operation to implement this and there will be loopholes and unforeseen consequences, but Monbiot argues it would be the simplest and most fair system to implement, which would provoke the least resistance. Monbiot is also smart enough to understand that just introducing rationing is not good enough, that existing inequalities will be made worse if the government will not give assistance to the poor, who e.g. may be living in inefficiently heated council flats.

Which then leaves the question: is it possible to live according to the standards we are used to on a CO2 budget that's only ten percent of what we use now? And how can we do this? Monbiot answers these questions by examining key sectors of the economy: housing, including the heating thereof, energy production, transport and shopping, with energy production given the most space as it obviously is the part of the economy most directly responsible for climate change. For each sector Monbiot examines the current situation and then shifts through the various ways to improve it as well as new methods to achieve the same goals more environmentally friendly. He needs to find the cheapest and most efficient solutions possible, while rejecting the inefficient, the greenwash and the sort of promising but nowhere near ready for primetime technofixes sold as an answer to CO2 reduction. There are no magic bullets and Monbiot is careful to show the costs as well as the benefits of each solution, nor afraid to challenge green dogmas when needed, as he does when discussing the merits of small scale at home energy production. His guidelines for any solution are how much impact it will have, can it be put into effect now and what are its guidelines; there's no room for personal or aesthetic preferences.

In the housing chapter, Monbiot looks at one of the biggest contributors to our energy bills -- our homes. He shows how abysmally bad the average British home is at keeping warm, how leaky and drafty, which means a good deal of the energy we spent keeping warm in winter is wasted, goes straight outside. Partially this is due to the great age of the British housing stock, with a median age of 72 years or so, but for a large part also due to the lack of regulation. The cheapest time to isolate a house is when it's being build, but property developers won't do this unless their clients ask for it or they're forced to by the government, as there is little to no gain in it for them. Monbiot uses the example of his own house, which could've been isolated when the previous owner renovated it, but wasn't. Then it would've cost only a thousand pounds or so to make it energy efficient, now it would cost tens of thousands and a couple of weeks moving out... He therefore argues the government should put up and enforce strict rules for new housing, up to the standard of the German developed passivhaus concept, which keeps its temperature constant with very little need for either heating or airconditioning. At the same time, older housing stock needs to be brought up to standard as well, again through government regulation and subsidies (something Alex has argued for as well, as an alternative to winterfuel payments). In this way the CO2 output associated with heating can be brought down to ten percent of current use.

Moving on to energy, monbiot devotes three chapters to the topic. In the first, he looks at our current energy provisions and what can be done to make them more efficient and limit their CO2 output, as well as which conventional fuels (coal, gas, oil, nuclear) are the best to invest in. Interestingly, despite initial skepticism, he becomes convinced carbon capture, in which the CO2 output of a coal or gas fueled powerstation is collected and stored underground, is a viable partial solution. In the second of the three chapters, he then looks at renewables: wind, solar, tidal energy and such and whether they can provide the energy we need without causing the accompanying CO2 production. It quickly becomes clear that these certainly are not a complete solution, if only because of reliabily issues and the question of peak demands. You can't switch on wind turbines as easily as a coalfired power station whent he entire nation gets up after Eastenders to put the kettle on... Finally, in the last chapter he looks at the "energy internet", in which every household could become its own power supplier, through using solar panels, micro wind turbines or even small but efficient gas turbines in place of boilers to supply your heat and electricy at the same time. Even more promising is the idea of using hydrogen fuel cells for the same task. By having each house and business provide their own enery, you could get even away from centralised energy production, though Monbiot quickly shows this is a pipedream, as such small scale energy production is not enough for serious industrial needs and a national energy grid is still required. But through using the best possible conventional power sources (preferably natural gas), combined with carbon capture as well as large scale renewables and smaller scale household energy production, he does show it is possible to generate enough energy for all of us and still slash 80 percent of current CO2 output.

With transport, Monbiot has his biggest challenge. On a regional and national level the answers are relatively easy: switch to public transport, using higher speed, but not too fast trains (as faster trains means more CO2 output), as well as a national coach bus network that doesn't make its users second class citizens. This could be done through locating bus services at the edge of towns, having regular, fast services between places people want to go and making the coaches themselves much more comfortable. More people will get out of their cars and into coaches if they're more comfortable and faster, but it would require government support and regulation again, something still lacking today. It need not be expensive either, especially as it could be done region by region, gradually extending the networks nation wide. National transport needs then are relatively easy, but the same doesn't go for international travel, that is, air travel. No matter what he tries, Monbiot cannot get air travel to fit in a ninety percent reduced CO2 budget, as it is just too wasteful and there are no good ways to make it less so. He therefore reluctantly comes to the conclusion that since we do need to reduce our CO2 output so much, air travel as we know it needs to disappear.

To cheer us up, he offers a simple solution to the problems with the last sector of the economy he examines: shopping. The supermarket as we know it, which is what this chapter is really about, is inherently wasteful, with its conflicting needs to keep stocks cool and shoppers warm, its extravagant lightning needs, its inefficient storage, its locations at the edge of towns only reachable by car. The alternative is easy: internet shopping. No more need for big supermarkets and individual trips to them, but big warehouses efficiently stocked and fleets of vans, each van taking the place of three cars...

As I said at the beginning the solutions on offer are only broad sketches, as this is not a detailed blueprint for a greener future, but what emerges is still a coherent, achievable proposal for limiting climate change, one that could be implemented relatively quickly. There's plenty to argue about, but Monbiot has certainly succeeded in showing that climate change can be fought without radical lifestyle changes or magic solutions. It won't be easy but it is possible.