What sets apart Heat: How To Stop the Planet from Burning by George Monbiot, and part of what makes it worth your time to read five years after its publication, is its unusual take on the problem of the global warming. Rather than trying to convince readers of the dangers of climage change, it tackles the complex and thorny problem of an adequate societal response.
George Monbiot sets himself the formidable task of finding ways to reduce the U.K.'s energy usage by 90% between 2007 and 2030. He says that he chose that number based on a study by the U.K.'s MET office. (If that seems extreme, in 2009 Hans Schellnhuber, Germany's chief climate advisor, found that 100% reductions would be necessary, as noted in Mark Hertsgaard's Hot.) The focus is not the whys of such a reduction, though they get their due, but the hows: how on Earth we could do such a thing without throwing whole societies into chaos. How it could be possible without freezing, starving, being rendered immobile, or plunged into literal and figurative darkness.
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