The new book from Duncan Clark and Mike Berners-Lee, The Burning Question, is probably the best synthesis of the key arguments over climate change that I’ve read.
As well as being an accessible, easy read, the authors have successfully avoided getting side-tracked or bogged down with any of the wonkery that too often surrounds the debate about global warming.
Whilst their book will not be revelatory to the minority of people who already follow this debate in detail, by taking a global perspective, by going back to first principles, and by honing in on the arguments that really matter and presenting them so succinctly, Clark and Berners-Lee have managed to bring a refreshing new clarity to the debate.
Their book is premised on what they rightly call the “inescapable conclusion,” that “to tackle global warming, we need to leave most of the world’s fossil fuel reserves in the ground” and that “barring enormous breakthroughs in carbon capture technology, stopping global warming means humankind deliberately bringing about peak fossil fuels. And not just a peak, but a sky-diving decline.”
In the chapters that follow they eloquently set out why the climate problem is so intractable, and why the various policy solutions aren’t being implemented. Indeed, if any friend asked for a single recommendation for a book that would explain why climate change isn’t getting solved already, this would be it.
However, the book is subtitled, “We can’t burn half the world’s oil, coal and gas. So how do we quit?” which is a bit misleading because this question isn’t the focus of the book.
In fact, like Matthew Lockwood, I saw the final chapters, which do look at the solutions, as the weakest part.
The Burning Question does briefly seek to grapple with how to respond to the fact that, “for now the pros and cons of different global policy options are somewhat academic because all of them involve rapidly constraining fossil fuel use and that remains politically unrealistic in the nations that matter the most: the ones that extract, burn and sell the majority of the world’s oil, coal and gas.”
But the answer to the enormous question this throws up – of how to shift the politics so substantially that they’re no longer politically unrealistic - is the real answer to the question, “how do we quit?”
This will need to be the subject of another book.
