Last night just before lights out I finished George Monbiot’s Heat: How We Can Stop The Planet Burning, his recent book about halting runaway carbon dioxide emissions before the world fries. This is a 2007 revision of the 2006 first publication, generously gifted to me by Ed Lynden-Bell, and it displays Monbiot’s habitual tenacity for referencing, with 50 pages of endnotes balancing 215 pages of content.
Heat is the climate change version of his Age of Consent; that book said, I’m calling for change in how we run the world, and I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and actually say how a new and fairer social system would function. It’s a compelling vision, full of ideas, mustering the thoughts of dozens of others and assembling them into a new way to order the world. His vision has its doubters, but as he himself said in that book’s final chapter, at least it is a vision, and it should give future conversations a place to begin.
In Heat, Monbiot takes the same approach with climate change. He puts his money where his mouth is and comes up with a way to reduce C02 output to safe levels without returning civilisation to the medieval era. Again, it is a densely-researched and compelling vision, calling on alternative technologies, changes in method, expectation adjustments, etc. He targets transport emissions, retail sector emissions, home energy use emissions, and considers the use of renewable energy sources and better-designed energy grids with admirable candour. He hits his targets in every area except air travel – flights, he concludes, can’t be rationalised and air travel will have to be massively cut.
It says that change is possible, that our situation is not irreversible; but also that change will need to be massive. Very few areas of our lives will be untouched by transformations necessary to keep our ecosystem going. It will take a great deal of effort, and crucially, a great deal of political or corporate leadership. And that, of course, is the trick; we have the means to save ourselves, but the decisionmakers are not primed to act.
My optimism is renewed from yesterday’s low point, but there’s a need for action. No Right Turn passes on a Guardian report saying that the need is urgent. But we end up in the same place we’ve been for years: I just some guy. What can I do?
Monbiot’s answer is to join a group like the Campaign Against Climate Change or People and Planet. My answer is similar: don’t underestimate the power you have if you engage. Here in NZ at least, the levers of government are all laid out ready for you to push. Letters you send and phone calls you make actually have an impact on local, regional and national government. To a lesser extent the same is true in other democracies.
So join an outfit or get a small group together and do something. (I’ve been supervising nearly 25 such small groups up at university who have been buzzing over the last month, changing their lifestyles and reaching out to affect others.) Change is possible, and it’s up to us.
[Hmm. Four climate change posts in a row. Guess it’s been on my mind this week…]
