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

Front Cover
Earthscan, 2007 - Architecture - 319 pages
That climate change is happening is now all too clear. Many of us want to take action to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. Yet the lack of a consolidated source of reliable information on how to calculate one?'s individual emissions and the difficulty in assessing different options for effectiveness and cost savings has proven to be a major stumbling block. But personal actions to reduce carbon emissions, if replicated on a sufficient scale, might just save the planet.How to Live a Low-Carbon Life provides the first comprehensive, one-stop reference guide to calculating individual carbon emissions and it lays out clear plans for how individuals can reduce their emissions. Covering all aspects of modern life from transport to home heating to food sources and the vexing issue of vacations, the book provides easy-to-use tables for conducting a personal lifestyle carbon audit.Easy reference tables enable rapid carbon footprint calculations, and a companion website houses downloadable spreadsheets to facilitate a complete lifestyle carbon audit as well as up-to-the minute information on new products and carbon-reducing technologies.This is the most comprehensive guide to calculating and reducing individual and home carbon emissions. It provides all the information needed for people and families to understand their impacts on the world?'s climate. It gives us the information to enable us to adjust lifestyles and live a responsible life.Written in an optimistic tone, How to Live a Low-Carbon Life shows how easy it is to take responsibility and reduce our personal carbon emissions.
 

Contents

Chapter 1 The Extraordinary Cheapness of Fossil Fuels
11
Chapter 2 The Scope for Government Action
25
Chapter 3 The Inadequacy of Alternative Means of Reducing Emissions
43
Chapter 4 No One Else Is Doing Much So Youd Better Do Something Yourself
57
Chapter 5 How Our Lives Generate Emissions and What We Can Do about It
71
Chapter 6 Home Heating
81
Chapter 7 Water Heating and Cooking
115
Chapter 8 Lighting
123
Chapter 13 Food
229
Chapter 14 Other Indirect Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions
247
Chapter 15 Domestic Use of Renewable Energy
255
Chapter 16 Cancelling Out Emissions
275
Chapter 17 Conclusions
285
Afterword
289
Sources of the Main Averages
293
Notes
297

Chapter 9 Household Appliances
135
Chapter 10 Car Travel
175
Chapter 11 Public Transport
211
Chapter 12 Air Travel
217
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
311
Index
313
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2007)

Chris Goodall is chair of telecommunications software company Dynmark International, a member of the UK Competition Commission and Utilities Appeal Panel, and the Green Party's Parliamentary Candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and is a former director of Which? Ltd.

Bibliographic information