George Monbiot is a bestselling author, columnist and Visiting professor at the School of the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes University in Great Britain. He has a web page dedicated to exposing phoney green credentials - www.turnuptheheat.org - now that it is winter and people are turning up the heat, adding to their carbon footprints, this is a most interesting exposure. But Monbiot means something else when he uses this old phrase: increase the attack against those responsible for global warming and particularly those who are denying it. Strange, as we are all responsible for global warming and each of us has our own "footprint". He says, "My fear is not that people will stop talking about climate change. My fear is that they will talk us to Kingdom Come". In Greenwash Exposed he attacks Richard Bronson for not taking action now, instead of in the distant future. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, Monbiot shows in great detail what ordinary people can do now.
In 1995 he was awarded by Nelson Mandela a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. His books include Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain and The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order. His website <www.monbiot.com> is a highly ranking comment site and holds an archive of his work. "Radical, pragmatic and totally surprising, Heat reveals how we can reconcile our demands for comfort, prosperity and peace with the increasingly pressing need to prevent us from destroying our future". George Monbiot was honoured by the Sunday Independent as one of the 40 international prophets of the 21st Century. For those who read Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (see Mmegi 30 March 2007) or saw the movie based on the book and the Veep's lecture circuit, you may wonder what more there is to say and why read Monbiot's book. Unfortunately there is a lot more to say, because Gore's take on things was not definitive. Monbiot spends far less space on documenting the problem and far more on dealing with the "denial industry" and the majority of his pages to what can be done about it. He is also writing from a British perspective, instead of an American one, so says things differently. Monbiot is no lightweight either, as 60 pages are devoted to three things: a few pages of organisations that are campaigning to reduce the impact of climate change (for you to follow-up on); extensive academic footnotes for his 11 chapters; and a comprehensive index. Heat is far cheaper than Gore's book, but then it lacks the lavish colour illustrations and graphs found there.
Monbiot's campaign of the day, in addition to constantly exposing "The Denial Industry" is a very simple one. Get the "standby" button on remote controls removed. If everyone would turn things off, he clams, it would significantly reduce one part of the way people live their lives that contributes to global warming.
Since these books were published the fourth assessment by the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (that was created in 1988) reported on February 2 this year that there was a link between global warming and climate change, and that unless action was taken sooner, rather than later, the world would be subject to unpredictable weather patterns, a rise in the level of oceans, and rising temperatures in summers. The panel was hopeful that if prompt action occurred the worse aspects of the crisis could be prevented.
The executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Achim Steiner, said: "In our daily lives we all respond urgently to dangers that are much less likely than climate change to affect the future of our children". He said that it was now certain, based on observations over the last 50 years, that humans had influenced climate change through the excessive release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If you want to read these reports, two of them for 2001 and 2007 are available from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on their web site www.ipcc.ch. There is an excellent "Summary for policy makers" here. You can even read the letter to governments that requires a reply by June 17. What is Botswana's official reply?
The reaction to these findings in the United States has not been positive. One senator attacked the report as a "corruption of science" and claimed that it was a "hoax" to believe that humans could influence climate change. The Secretary of Energy, Samuel Bodman, claimed the United States was a "small contributor" to the problem and called for a "global solution". But America, with 300 million people (five percent of six billion) contributes up to a third of the greenhouse gas emissions, both locally and through their worldwide endeavours. The forecast for semi-arid and subtropical regions, where drought has long been a problem, is a drop of at least 20 percent in rainfall due to the northern world's greenhouse gas emissions. Botswana may not be affected by rising ocean levels, but the intensification of droughts will have serious consequences here.
Monbiot's argument is that every little bit adds up. In Botswana people should be looking for ways to rely more on solar energy and when alternative forms of transport, including solar powered cars, become available incentives should be provided and steps taken so that they are utilised. The government should lead by offering subsidies, reduced taxes, and even grants, so that more is done to increase reliance on solar power instead of imported fossil fuels, and to reduce the use of water through encouraging the use of composting instead of flush toilets. To reduce water consumption, increase water recycling, is also an essential part of an integrated strategy. In Heat Monbiot demonstrates how carbon emissions can be reduced by 90 percent by 2030 - and without undermining the benefits of so-called Western civilization that people have becomes so enmeshed in. It begins with the transformation of our homes, where we make the decisions on what we consume, our use of power and the way we travel.
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