Mike Berners-Lee - The Burning Question: We Cant Burn Half the Worlds Oil, Coal, and Gas. So How Do We Quit?

Praise for The Burning Question

The Burning Question is a fascinating examination of the forces that have led to our current predicament and it presents an important framework for a sustainable future. I recommend it highly. The climate crisis is a challenge unprecedented in its scale and complexity. We simply must confront this existential challenge and stop making it worse. That will require the awakening and activism of people all around the world.

Al Gore

45th Vice-President of the United States

The issues explored in The Burning Question are hugely important. Policymakers and the public urgently need to be engaging in this kind of big-picture conversation.

Jim Hansen

Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

This is a book that needed to be written: it asks the right question then seeks the most effective ways of answering it. An essential contribution to our thinking about climate change.

George Monbiot

Writer and campaigner

Fossil fuels are so last century. The Burning Question tells us clearly why and how to get off them, but crucially also explores why we arent doing anything much about it at the moment, and points the finger at the villains of the piece. Terrific.

Sir Tim Smit

Founder of the Eden Project

The Burning Question is one of those books that doesnt shy away from delivering an uncomfortable message theres no sweetening of the pill, placating political interests or pandering to commercial sensibilities it simply tells it like it is. But much more than that, in accessible language it develops responses to the challenges we face not utopian social change, or unrealistic technical wizardry, but rather a portfolio of options thought through at a system level. The Burning Question is an important contribution to understanding both the scale of the climate challenge and how we may yet develop a low-carbon and climate-resilient society.

Professor Kevin Anderson

Deputy director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change research

To keep climate denial from turning into climate despair that we dont know how to solve the climate challenge without suppressing civilisation we need a realistic assessment of the problem and an optimistic set of solutions. This book gives us both, in a short but compelling narrative that may be the difference between a glide to a decent future and a crash of civilisation. Read it, share it, and start preaching its gospel.

Durwood Zaelke

President of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development

An extremely clear-sighted and highly readable account of the factors fanning the flames of climate change with plenty of practical suggestions how to set about extinguishing them.

Baroness Worthington

Climate change policy expert and life peer

Its terrifyingly simple. Burning carbon made our modern industrial world. Now weve got to stop burning it. Weve got to stop drilling for oil and gas, and leave the coal in the ground. Weve got to prick the carbon bubble, write off half the assets of the worlds biggest industry, and break the infrastructure and mental lock-in that is preventing viable new energy technologies from taking over. This is the big-picture story of why and how that must happen. And why, so far, we are abjectly failing. Brilliant.

Fred Pearce

Author of The Last Generation

At a time when were making the climate debate small, a series of bite-sized chunks each to be smuggled through a resistant policy system, Berners-Lee and Clark remind us that the debate is actually huge in its global scope, its likely impact and, most importantly of all, in terms of the solutions we need to adopt.

Mike Barry

Head of Sustainable Business, Marks & Spencer

An easy-to-read book about a difficult-to-solve problem. Berners-Lee and Clark illustrate why climate change is such a complex issue. But also that it has a solution.

Samuel Fankhauser

Co-Director, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE

The image of scientists and academics used to be one of calm, mild-mannered people but today the frustration among many is palpable. This book shows why. The gap between evidence, policy and practice is yawningly wide. This book tries to bridge that gap, offering a reasoned account of the problem and suggesting what we might do about it from global policy to culture change.

Tim Lang

Professor of food policy, City University London

Climate change is the most difficult problem the world has ever faced. Berners-Lee and Clark have compressed this complex issue into a short and highly readable book that covers science, psychology and sociology. Uncompromisingly rigorous but easy to read, this book is a perfect introduction to the central topic of the twenty-first century.

Chris Goodall

Low-carbon technology expert and author of Sustainability: All That Matters

This book hits the climate nail bang on the head: we can only avoid devastating damage if most of the worlds coal, oil and gas are left in the ground. In wonderfully clear and readable prose, the authors set out the facts and what we must do about them. It deserves to be widely read: I only hope it will reawaken the climate movement, which has gone into such desperate decline over the last three years. Only public pressure will force governments to close down coal fired power stations and end our oil dependence: this book is a lucid and powerful call to arms.

Michael Jacobs

Visiting professor, Grantham Research Institute, LSE and former special adviser on climate change to the UK Prime Minister

THE BURNING QUESTION

Mike Berners-Lee is a leading expert on carbon emissions, founder of Small World Consulting and author of How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything. He is involved in sustainability research across many departments at Lancaster University and has worked on energy and emissions with a wide range of corporate and public sector organisations.

Duncan Clark is a consultant editor on the Guardian environment desk, co-founder of digital journalism company Kiln and a visiting researcher at the UCL Energy Institute. He helped set up and run the 10:10 climate campaign, is the author of The Rough Guide to Green Living and has edited many books on climate change and related topics.

We cant burn half the worlds oil, coal and gas. So how do we quit?

MIKE BERNERS-LEE & DUNCAN CLARK

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

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Copyright Mike Berners-Lee & Duncan Clark, 2013

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Typeset in Minion, Sun and Landry Gothic to a design by Duncan Clark and Henry Iles.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk.

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