Carbon Cutters - Books To Read

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Required reading:

Chris Goodall "How to Live a Low-Carbon Life"

Richard Heinberg "The Party's Over"

George Monbiot "Heat"

Required watching:

The Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil - DVD

The End of Suburbia - Oil Depletion & the Collapse of the American Dream - DVD

The Revolution

This is a revolution. If you want to shut an airport then stop flying. Want an end to factory farming? Grow your own. An end to pollution? Change to renewables. An end to war & poverty? Microgenerate. Life for your childen? Stop needing oil. YOU have THIS Power. You do not need Government. Seize the initiative. Bring democracy to your community. Be an example to your children. Take responsibility. Change for good today.

Our Recommendations

Chris Goodall "How to Live a Low Carbon Life"

We recommend that everyone reads one or more of the books on this page. These contain all the information and data you need to understand the Carbon Cutting Philosophy. We have also read and reviewed many, many more books than this. These are listed in this section and catalogued here by range of Author's family name. Please feel free to browse through our selection:

Authors A thru D | Authors E thru H | Authors I thru L | Authors M thru Q | Authors R thru U | Authors V thru Z

Books You Must Read

Here are the books you must read. If you don't like reading books then please link over to our sections that deal with Magazines and Electronic Newsletters. Each page on this web site often has a long list of Resources - links to suitable web sites with even more information. But nothing beats sitting down with a good book! Enjoy.

Goodall "Low-Carbon Life"

ISBN 978 1 84407 426 6. Published in 2006 by Earthscan. Written by Chris Goodall and subtitled "The Individual's Guide to Stopping Climate Change". Chris lives not far away from us in Oxfordshire, England and I have been in contact with him personally before I read his book. I questioned some of the simplistic advice on his web-site but, as he pointed out, the book goes into far more detail and the web site is not indicative. Hence I would like to say only nice things about Chris's work. Indeed it is an impressive source book for us 'low-carbon freaks' in the United Kingdom. Without a doubt Chris is an extremely smart guy - his Harvard Business School MBA and Green Party Candidacy are testimony to this. He is firmly 'establishment' with his former Directorships and membership of the UK Competition Commission. With this insight he contributes an early section that is quite illuminating with its plain language description of how Globalisation and the WTO is pitched in a head-on battle with anti-Carbon measures. The WTO believes that all trade is good and any form of 'localisation' is a restrictive trade practice. There is plenty of ammunition here and this is worth a book in its own right. After this the book settles into Chris's trawl through every possible measure that individuals can take to reduce their Carbon Footprints. There are some surprising conclusions in some of his statistics and it is a real eye-opener. However, if there must be criticism it is that the statistics are a bit scatter-gun. Rarely does the book thoroughly examine the 'embedded carbon' consumed in making such items as washing machines,

solar panels or fridges. (I suspect that this is due to a lack of data - although this doesn't stop Chris from just guessing numbers where he felt fit!) Embedded Carbon is mostly excluded from the numbers. Some numbers are presented in an idiosyncratic fashion with apples occasionally compared to pears. He uses cost per tonne of Carbon as a baseline number to compare various measures - great idea but sometimes the cost is nothing of even negative where the measures pay for themselves. I also suggest that the reader thoroughly examines the section on Car driving with a critical eye. On the first read through it looks as if Chris suggests that you should never replace your car unless it has blown up. However this assumption works on the basis that you sell your old car to someone who never had a car before. This suggest that every car sale increases cars on the road by 100% although this contradicts the actual numbers of 1% to 2%pa Chris quotes elsewhere. Hence the individual incremental embedded Carbon of a new car is the new one minus an old one that gets scrapped out of the entire supply chain at some point. Maybe I should re-read this section because I am sure he can't mean this! A thoroughly recommended read but be careful with all the numbers. Use as a source book of ideas.

Heinberg "Party's Over"

ISBN 1-902636-45-7. Published in 2003 by Clairview. This work is significant for me as it was probably my first introduction to the concepts of oil depletion and what this means for Industrialised Society in the west. This is subtitled "Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies" and sums it up neatly. Global Oil production will peak and probably has already done so by the time I am writing these words in early 2007. Even with a switch to renewables and sustainable technologies we will have to live with a lot less energy that we have been used to over the last 200 years - hence the title of the Book - indeed, the 'party' will be over and all the trappings of this cheap energy society will be swept away by a new harsh realism. Heinberg traces the history of fossil fuels back hundreds of years to the point that Europeans ran out of wood and had to resort to coal. This is a genuine wake-up call for everyone. Essential reading.

I'm not taking it any more!

Post-Carbon Man is on the warpath again. You'll find him everywhere. Don't get him started on our rights and responsibilities! He has had enough and he isn't taking it any more.

Learn what he has to say by clicking right here Make sure you have enabled popups!

Hillman "How we can save..."

Mayer Hillman's "How we can save the Planet". ISBN 0-141-01692-2 published in 2004 by Penguin Books. This book manages to be infuriating for all the normal reasons. Firstly Mayer often understates the damage that Global Warming will cause. You often conclude that it will just be a bit of bad weather. The real damage is so couched in vague language that the reality is never fully communicated to the reader. Let's face it - we are talking about massive crop failure, starvation and economic collapse leading to global suffering and death. You, me, everyone you know in London, Paris, New York, dead or starving to death or suffering a very violent death. The other problem with this book is that you have to wait until page 146 out of 180 before the author actually deals with 'how WE can save the planet'. Until that point he largely does the opposite of what the book title suggests. He maintains that almost every possible solution won't work so WE can nothing - instead we need massive Government intervention to reduce Carbon use. This is extremely disheartening - so much so that when he gets to the point of telling us (as individuals) what we can do most people may have stopped reading. I do recommend this book but read the last chapter FIRST then read the rest. WE can all do something BUT we need Governmental structures to level the playing field AND we need the help of every possible field of science & technology to help. Even if it is only a 3% saving EVERY solution has its bit to play. That includes reforestation. All we need are 23 solutions contributing 3% carbon savings each in order to fix our carbon output at sustainable levels. There is no one solution as this author implies.

Hamilton "Growth Fetish"

ISBN 0-7453-2250-6. Published by Pluto Press in 2003. A disarmingly simple book about a very simple and inconvenient truth: despite record levels of prosperity and growth in many industrialised western nations nobody is happier. Why is that? Could it be that all our economic metrics are useless in measuring human worth? Does another plasma-TV really make you feel better? You live in a world of relentless hard work and ambition. You have no time for family or hobbies as you try to live up to the economic measure of success - having as much money as possible. It doesn't make you feel good. A brilliantly original book and a must-read. Why do we continue to wreck the only planet we have in the pursuit of ever heightened levels of consumption? A damning indictment of consumerism. Economic growth did not lead to better lives for everyone. Our social priorities and political structures have become corrupted with an obsession for growth. Everyone is alienated. Affluence is a sickness rotting our communities and creating generation of selfish, useless, people. Hamilton argues for a whole new set of metrics for measuring economic success. He believes that we are wasting our talents on marketing the same old rubbish over and over again in new labels.. and boy does he hate marketing! A work of philosophy of gaining relevance. We will all take a leaf from this book when the oil dries up, the planet burns and the Americans come for you... Thoroughly and wholeheartedly recommended. Maybe one of the better books you will ever take home.

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