Start by closing your fridge
British author offers climate-change solutions that make sense
Quentin Mills-Fenn

CBC recently reported that an ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields broke off Ellesmere Island.

Scientists were surprised by the speed of the collapse — it took less than an hour. Researchers suspect climate change played a role.

Even though global warming cannot be confirmed as the cause, the news of the collapse of the Ayres Ice Shelf seems like a suitable introduction to Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning (Doubleday Canada), the new book by British journalist George Monbiot.

Despite the presence of a series of back-cover blurbs from prominent eco-Canucks such as David Suzuki, Thomas Homer-Dixon and David Chernushenko of the Green Party of Canada, Heat deals mainly with the situation in the U.K. under Tony Blair.

Still, Monbiot provides us with our very own “Foreword to the Canadian edition,” which begins, “In the court of international opinion, Canada has been let off lightly.” The author goes on to write that there’s “scarcely a whisker of difference” between Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions and those of the United States and Australia, the poster children for eco-villainy.

In Europe, emissions have generally been falling but in Canada they’ve been rising for the last decade.

Monbiot also has harsh words for our prime minister and his environment minister, Rona Ambrose. Thanks to the new government of Canada, he writes, our environmental reputation is catching up to our performance. The Liberals, he adds, talked a better line than the Conservatives but were just as ecologically destructive.

That said, most of Heat is drawn from the dismal British experience.

Monbiot argues that carbon emissions must be cut by 90 per cent by 2030 or major ecosystems will collapse. Unlike more radical environmentalists screaming “Back to the Pleistocene!” Monbiot wants these reductions to be as painless as possible. Chapter by chapter, he explains how this goal could be achieved.

He looks at things such as home heating and offshore wind-farms, for example, and points out the absurdity of enormous supermarkets with open freezers. Do you leave your refrigerator door open? I thought not.

Some of his suggestions seem like common sense. He points out that, in Britain, inter-city buses have their depots in town centres, a holdover from the days of horse-drawn coaches. As a result of this anachronism, modern-day buses have to crawl through crowded streets, greatly adding to the time and inconvenience of a bus journey. Why not, he proposes, have depots on the outskirts of a town, readily accessible to local transit?

Most impressively, Monbiot has the science to back his arguments up. He provides 48 pages of footnotes in a book under 300 pages in total.

I stumbled on the customer reviews of Heat on Amazon.com and was struck by one contributor’s comments. The reviewer mistakenly attributes some comments to Monbiot and goes on to add, bizarrely, that the author favours a universal government ruling over six billion freezing, starving people, concluding that Monbiot is a fan of North Korea.

I was puzzled as to what book the reviewer had read — it certainly wasn’t Heat — and I concluded that he was simply manufacturing counter-propaganda, part of what Monbiot terms ‘the denial industry.’

Perhaps instead of plugging their ears and shrieking “No, No, No!” these skeptics should actually read what Monbiot has to say. If they were to consider his well-reasoned arguments, we might actually get somewhere.