Citations from Heat by George Monbiot
Published by marco on
Heat is a very accessible book on the state of the world’s climate, energy and heating needs today and going into the future. The author sets himself the task of coming up with a plan for our planet that is economically, socially and climatologically viable. His express goal is to keep convenience and freedom as much like it is now as possible while reducing CO2 emissions by 90% across the board—domestic usage, air travel, industrial, transports, construction and so on.
He will not altogether succeed, but his studies do show that much of the lifestyle to which we in the rich world have become accustomed is based on a profligate waste of what has heretofore been extremely cheap energy. More precisely, the energy we use is vastly undervalued and underpriced and usually heavily subsidized. The more micro-level of his studies are based on the UK and its culture and economy, but the results apply broadly to other countries, particularly Europe and the U.S. if not so well to the considerably different spread of energy use in China and India.
What follows are citations I found interesting enough to mark as I was reading. They are not meant to paint a picture, but are more interesting or just well-written nuggets of information culled from the book.
Amazing Electricity
For instance, the following paragraph illustrates a process that most of us take for granted. The proposals of many so-called environmentalists to replace a country’s electricity grid with micro-turbines are made not only hopelessly, but laughably naive by not considering how the current system works and the level of service that it provides. Any replacement system will have to provide the same level of service or will have to wait until straits are much more dire.
“What this means is that the electricity companies must study the behaviour of their customers, chart their historical use of electricity, anticipate public holidays and national events, read the weather forecasts and the television schedules and study the ratings, and watch the penalty shoot-outs in order to determine when the entire country will lever its collective backside off the sofa.”
Page 80
And the electricity companies do this within minutes. They may not be the most efficient or the cheapest, but the level of service they provide is amazing—and all the more amazing in that we never think about it at all. I’ve lived in Switzerland for over seven years and can only recall one power outage, which lasted less than a second.
Even Smarter Networks
The system can be improved, though, with modern technology assisting devices to be much smarter about their own consumption. The devices can make decisions on their own or they could communicate with one another right over the same lines from which they draw their power.
“An open standard protocol [should] be developed and published to allow information about the instantaneous price of electricity to be broadcast through the electricity supply system. Much of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum would be available for this purpose without interfering with the principal power supply function, much as a telephone line can simultaneously provide voice and broadband Internet service.”
Page 116
A colleague of mine has Powerline, which uses exactly this kind of technology to allow home networks to run over the power lines running throughout a home instead of having to lay down dedicated cables or using a wireless network.
Cars and Subsidies
Most western society also deliberately encourages the wrong behavior. That is, those on the right might be sick to no end of the platitudes spouted by politicians about the environment. Because of this, they may feel that the government is left-leaning and poised to whisk away freedoms right out from under their libertarian feet. However, with politicians—with anyone, in fact—its important to remember that whom they pay is more important than what they say. For example, in England, subsidies are far heavier in support of automobiles than public transportation.
“One of the reasons for this can be found in the paper [The British government] published in 2005. The graphs there show that though gross domestic product has risen by 60 per cent since 1986, the cost of driving has fallen. The government expects the two lines to keep diverging to 2025 and beyond. While bus and coach fares have risen in real terms by 66 per cent since 1975, and train tickets by 70 per cent, the cost of owning and running a car has fallen by 11 per cent.”
Page 145
Those using public transportation are seeing their costs rising far beyond any possible cost-of-living increase, which clearly actively discourages use of such. However, auto commuters have seen their costs drop, despite everything else having gotten more expensive. There is no way to imagine this happening without massive subsidies, likely mostly hidden, but nonetheless real. It’s not a great stretch of the imagination to suppose that things are much the same in the States.
“The speed and acceleration of our cars is a form of profligacy at which all future generations will goggle.”
Page 154
Nicely put. So not only has car ownership gotten cheaper, but cars have become more and more powerful—ridiculously overpowered for all practical purposes.
Food
Monbiot also takes care to very clearly and open-eyed address the sheer immorality of living our “profligate” lifestyles, which will very consequently lead to droughts in countries of which we have scarcely heard, and of multitudes of deaths of people that we would never have met. Out of sight, out of mind for most (this author included, difficult as it is to admit).
“People who own cars – by definition – have more money than people at risk of starvation: their demand is ‘effective’, while the groans of the starving are not. In a contest between cars and people, the care would win. Something rather like this is happening already. Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the global increase in crop production is being used mostly to feed animals: the number of livestock on earth has quintupled since 1950. The reason is that those who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who only buy subsistence crops.”
Page 159
The world is raising more food than ever, but “wasting” it on feeding other food that ends up costing far more energy than is necessary. Meat is a unbelievable luxury to which most of us have become incredibly accustomed—but the costs are astronomical.
Flying
As with the automotive subsidies, the UK has no trouble talking out of both sides of its mouth vis-à-vis air travel. For example, they promise that increased air travel can somehow be reconciled with relatively aggresive carbon cuts.
“The new runways [the British government] is planning ‘would permit around 470 million passengers by 2030’.
“You might wonder how the British government reconciles this projection with its commitment to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. The answer is that it doesn’t have to. As the Department for Transport cheerfully admits,
“International flights from the UK do not currently count in the national inventories of greenhouse gas emissions as there is no international agreement yet on ways of allocating such emissions.
“This is a remarkable evasion. It is true that there is ‘no international agreement yet’. But a child could see that you simply divide the emissions by half. The country from which passengers depart or in which they arrive accepts 50 per cent of the responsibility.”
Page 174
Aha! So that’s how they do it! Air travel can be increased because, without an “international agreement” on parcelling out blame for the CO2 it generates, that CO2 can be ignored. *POOF* It just no longer exists. The planet, of course, will not ignore the CO2 as easily as self-interested politicians, who seem to have the morals and reasoning ability of four-year-olds.
Flying is a luxury taken for granted by those of us in the first world. I live in Switzerland, separated from a good part of my family, which lives in the States. That personal air travel (for the most part) cannot be reconciled with the massive drops in CO2 required by the climate affects me directly. It’s hard to feel sorry for myself as it’s not like I’m starving, dehydrating or drowning as so many others are. But Monbiot puts it so well, let’s let him say it:
“Perhaps the most intractable cause of global warming is ‘love miles’: the distance you must to travel [sic] to visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the planet. The world could be destroyed by love.”
Page 22
“A wealthy society’s split incentives are shared by its government. As Tony Blair remarked, ‘there is a mismatch in timing between the environmental and electoral impact.’ By the time the decisions he has made come home to roost, he will have been out of office for years. If a government allows the growth of air travel to continue, for example, the effects are delayed, diffuse and hard to blame on any one source. If, by contrast, it restricts or reverses the growth in flights, the effects are immediately attributable to its actions. Everyone knows who is responsible if we may no longer fly to Thailand.”
Page 22
“So I offer you no comfort in this chapter. A 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions means the end of distant foreign holidays, unless you are prepared to take a long time getting there. It means that business meetings must take place over the Internet or by means of video conferences. It means that trans-continental journeys must be made by train – and even then not by the fastest trains – or coach. It means that journeys around the world must be reserved for visiting the people you love, and that they will require both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations. It means the end of shopping trips to New York, parties in Ibiza, second homes in Tuscany and, most painfully for me, political meetings in Porto Alegre – unless you believe that these activities are worth the sacrifice of the biosphere and the lives of the poor. But I urge you to remember that these privations affect a tiny proportion of the world’s people. The reason they seem so harsh is that this tiny proportion almost certainly includes you. (Emphasis added.)”
Page 187
The sentences I emphasized sum up the moral argument in a nutshell. It’s really hard to argue your way around them.
It’s not me, it’s you
Even after having written the book, Monbiot still found it hard to imagine how exactly all of these dire predictions would affect his own life.
“Similarly, when considering what might happen to people in my own country or in other parts of the rich world – in which the human impacts of global warming will be delayed both by our more forgiving climate and by the money we can spend on our protection – I have found the likely effects easy to catalogue but almost impossible to imagine. I can understand, intellectually, that ‘life’ in this country might not be the same in thirty years’ time as it is today; that if climate change goes unchecked it could in fact be profoundly and catastrophically different. But somehow I have been unable to turn this knowledge into a recognition that my own life will alter. Like everyone who has been insulated from death, I have projected the future as repeated instance of the present. The world might change, but I will not.”
Page 205
Hey, here’s an idea! How about we do absolutely nothing and wait for the problem to go away by itself?
“It could well be true that petroleum will peak within the next 10 years; it could also be true that it will take 30. If this is the case and if we have placed our faith in the decline of oil supplies while simultaneously failing to do anything to prevent it (not, I am afraid to say, an unlikely proposition), we could find ourselves facing catastrophic climate change and an unprecedented global depression. (Emphasis added)”
Page 209
The decline of oil will most certainly not be a fun time on this planet. There will be resource wars and nearly unimaginable transgressions against nature as the last dregs of petroleum are wrenched from the earth and bombarded with noxious chemicals to refine it. As Monbiot points out, the less dependent we are on such processes, the more we mitigate the effects of the inevitable economic privations that will come from a large, jarring and unplanned-for transition.
On Carbon Indulgences
So here’s a nice explanation of why these indulgences are complete and utter bullshit. Again, the emphasis is mine, but it’s the reason that proponents of such practices are guilty of hand-waving flim-flammery (yeah, I’m kinda looking at you, Al Gore, though your film was quite good).
“Planting trees in one place might kill trees elsewhere, as they could dry up a river which was feeding a forest downstream. By taking up land which might otherwise have been used to grow crops, it could drive local people to fell forests elsewhere in order to feed themselves. Your trees might die before they reach maturity, especially as their growing conditions change with global warming. Timber poachers could fell them; a forest fire could fry them. In other words, in flying to New York we can be sure that carbon dioxide has been released. In paying to plant trees, we cannot be sure that it will be absorbed. (Emphasis added.)”
Page 211
Waiting for a Miracle
In the end, Monbiot acknowledges that we are mostly still hoping for a miracle technological fix. But the preceding 215 pages showed that there are no miracles that will come quickly enough to save us. It is only pragmatic reduction, restriction and reorientation that will save us from ourselves.
“But if those governments that have expressed a commitment to stopping climate change have found their efforts frustrated, it is partly because they wanted them to be frustrated. They know that inside their electors is a small but insistent voice asking them both to try and to fail. They know that if they had the misfortune to succeed, our lives would have to change. They know that we can contemplate a transformation of anyone’s existence but our own.”
Page 213
The problem with climate change is that those that are causing the problem are those least incentivized to do anything about it. It’s easy to imagine that the coming climate change will be a total game-changer. It may not be the undoing of mankind, but it will drastically reorganize things—one must at least become familiar with the word “dystopia” to discuss the future, I think.