Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning by George Monbiot

This book sets out a way to cut our carbon emissions by 90% by 2030 without sending us all back to the stone age. The science seems sound to my only slightly trained eye, so I'd recommend that anyone who's a political leader or who's in a position to make significant invetment in new technologies read this. Maybe if that sending-books-to-Stephen-Harper thing is still going on, someone could send him this. (The Canadian edition starts out by laying a smackdown on Canada for the Harper government's policies.) I can suggest only one improvement, and that would be to put a brief summary of all the recommendations at the end of the book. I'm sure I forgot some things by the time I finished reading it. But it's really not that big a deal for the reader to page back.

There are lots of good ideas in this book, but my favourite (just because it's so obvious in retrospect and so applicable to real-life) is the idea of appliances like washing machines and dishwashers where you load them up and then they will automatically start operating when overall demand on the power grid is low. Obviously you'd need to be able to override that, but it's such a good idea!

Reading this book did bring up one thing that has been sort of quietly bugging me about environmentalism for a while: there seems to be greater value placed on cutting back your own footprint than on having a small footprint in the first place. If you give up driving during Environment Week, and you can get points for Commuter Challenge. Give up your car permanently, and you've won the One Tonne Challenge. But if you don't own a car in the first place, you don't get any credit. Which is kind of frustrating for me as I sit here, childfree, carfree and vegetarian, in my LEED-certified apartment. Monbiot insists that everyone needs to cut back by 90%, and while he maybe means that in the macro sense (the suggestions in the book are all things that governments and businesses can do rather than personal choices - policies have to be changed, different products need to be available etc.) I still find it kind of annoying that by his philosophy, there's no possible way anyone, no matter how virtuous, can count as having already cut back their 90%.