Review: Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning
Originally published in Z Magazine, February, 2007 Volume 20 #2. Reposted with permission.
Doubleday Canada, 2006, 304 pp.
By George Monbiot
George Monbiot's Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning is a brilliant, flawed, and deeply important look at what it will take to slow global warming below a catastrophic level.
Monbiot, one of the clearest and wittiest writers about politically difficult subjects today, tackles the problem of phasing out fossil fuels without illusions. Books on global warming normally expend most of their words to show how dangerous the problem is. Then, at the last, they point to a few partial solutions and say "more like that, please." Or they simply give up on a comfortable life for everyone and turn to a kind of gloating Puritanism and say "You will have to suffer, but it will be good for you in the end." In contrast, Monbiot takes a step-by-step look at how different sectors of our economy could run on drastically less carbon.
Read the rest:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/7/154510/6825