Customer Reviews

How to Live a Low-Carbon Life: The Individual's Guide to Stopping Climate Change

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Chris Goodall (Telecommunications chair of software company Dynmark International) presents How to Live a Low-Carbon Life: The Individual's Guide to Stopping Climate Change, a guide for the socially responsible to reducing one's carbon emissions and therefore aid in preventing global catastrophe. Chapters cover how to calculate one's carbon dioxide emissions and reduce them to 3 tonnes a year or less, the amount that the Earth can sustainably absorb per person. From home heating to lighting, appliances, car travel, air travel, means of cancelling out emissions, and much more, How to Live a Low-Carbon Life is thoroughly easy to use. "Anyone looking for energy efficiency should concentrate the search on the smaller fridge freezers. Going from a 300 litre capacity machine to a 400 litre will typically add about 60kWh/year to electricity consumption, so it makes sense to try to buy a moderately sized appliance." Highly recommended.

Despite the strong evidence for global warming, neither industries nor governments are changing their assumption that the world has an inexhaustible supply of inexpensive fossil fuel. Instead, individuals will make the difference, because consumer desires fuel the business cycle. In chapters that cover daily activities such as home heating, cooking, travel and use of appliances, Chris Goodall explains how you can reduce your carbon emissions from an average of 12.5 tons per year to three. Though the book sometimes bogs down in an overabundance of information, charts and formulas, we recommend it to individuals and organizations who want to learn how they can make an immediate difference.

This book has a lot of interesting fact and data, but they are all center on England and little is said about the USA and our energy use. I found the mathematical formulas and their process of think and conclusions about data to be the most interesting part of the book. I found to be a good read but was disappointed that all of the suggestions they made where to reform government to make it more environmental friendly. The book did show how our person choices have an impact but the book said that all real change had come from the government of course I disagree with this.