Other recent books like The Weather Makers explain what we're doing to cause global warming and the catastrophes it will soon cause. George Monbiot's book Heat
is devoted entirely to answering the question What Do We Do To Stop It.
This is the first in a series of articles summarizing his action plan.
From
the outset, Monbiot makes clear that he's not looking for a subsistence
solution: He doesn't believe any such solution can be 'sold' to the
majority of the people in affluent nations, so he doesn't propose to
try. We need to retain, he says, our creature comforts, our political
and economic freedoms, our right to health care and education and
security and freedom from fear.
The deadline for effective
action to curb global warming, he argues, is 2030, and by then we need
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90%, nothing less. Heat
prescribes the least difficult and least painful means to do so. This
includes:
- dramatically improved ways to build homes and other buildings
- the optimal mix of feasible renewable and non-renewable means of supplying energy to those buildings
- radical changes to land transportation without significantly reducing mobility
- a
significant curtailing of air travel, since it is a major greenhouse
gas contributor for which no satisfactory way of reducing emissions by
90% is available
- mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of the retail and cement industries by 90%
Monbiot
quickly dismisses voluntary approaches to achieving these ends, and
asserts that "unfashionable" strict government regulation and
compliance enforcement will be essential to success. "By and large", he
says, "whatever our beliefs may be, we consume as much as our incomes
allow". But beyond the regulations absolutely needed to achieve these
90% reductions, he insists that governments must maximize freedoms of
citizens.
Monbiot is scornful of the 'light green'
technophiles who believe (because it's easy) that new technologies will
allow us to innovate our way to solutions to global warming. Micro wind
turbines, for example, are "a waste of time and money". He is equally
scornful of the 'dark green' eco neosurvivalists who rejoice at the
idea of civilizational collapse, and their cohorts who proclaim (as I
have done) that it is already, realistically, too late to hope that
anything we could do will be enough or in time.
So in his
introduction he's already set himself against the global warming
holocaust deniers, the believers in using market forces, the
technophiles, the radical greens and the green fatalists. That's just
about everyone. "As always", he says, "I am destined to offend
everyone". His goal in this book is "to prompt you not to lament our
governments' failures to introduce the measures required to tackle
climate change, but to force them to reverse their policies, by joining
what must become the world's most powerful political movement".
The
key mechanism for enforcement of Monbiot's solution is a carbon
rationing system, using a second 'currency' (Monbiot calls it 'icecaps'
to remind us of its purpose)allocated equally to each consumer on our
electricity, home fuel and transportation fuel usage. Individuals would
be allotted 40% of the national total carbon ration, and the remaining
60% would be held by the government for its use and to auction to
corporations to the highest bidder. There would be a free market for
the rations -- the poor and efficient could sell what they did not need
to the rich for whatever the going market price turned out to be, so
that the ration would apply fairly to all yet also allow for income
redistribution between rich and poor. And the rationing system would
also reward conservation and innovation in energy efficiency.
The
rationing system would have to be accompanied by a large, subsidized
system to encourage improvements in home appliance efficiency and
insulation, in public transportation, and in special subsidies during
extreme weather conditions (to buy more 'icecaps', not to exceed their
ration).
You can't fault him for ambition.
In upcoming
parts of this review, I'll describe the other elements of Monbiot's
solution in more detail: Improving home energy efficiency, optimizing
the mix of alternative energy sources, improving the transportation
system, reducing our 'air miles', and improving the retail and cement
industries. In each case the improvement is towards the goal of
reducing emissions, not energy efficiency -- by decoupling these in our
minds and our markets he proposes to encourage and reward technologies
that are cleaner, without depending on them for success. And in his
final chapter, Monbiot tackles, and lays to rest, the four 'messiahs'
that others believe can or will make the need to tackle climate change
moot: new fuel technologies, new cleaning technologies, Peak Oil, and
the market mechanism of carbon offsets. Peak Oil in particular, he
argues, could well make global warming worse.
Stay tuned for Part Two. And go get the book. |
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