Climate Diet book - the Latest Dieting Fad?
by Kristin Underwood, San Diego, CA on 07. 6.08
Image from HealthyLivingNYC.
While there are books aplenty today about going green, greening your lifestyle and green for dummies, The Climate Diet is the first to offer you greening solutions in terms of a weight watchers diet. The book also shows how you can not only cut emissions but also save money by cutting out the excess in your life.
The Climate Diet: How You Can Cut Carbon, Cut Costs, And Save the Planet, by Jonathan Harrington, offers readers tips on how to reduce their carbon footprint in areas of their life, such as, heating, transportation, community and home. While it’s a good ‘how to go green’ book, it doesn’t necessarily offer anything that the other green books haven’t.
Instead of sitting on your couch and arguing over what made you carbon heavy (or whether China is to blame), Harrington says, “all the debate in the world about the roots of our environmental crisis will not solve the problem” so we have to just get up and do something about it. Data is often thrown around today stating that the US has a tiny fraction of the global population but currently emits up to 25% of global CO2, but Harrington also makes the interesting point that,
"between 1850 and 2000, the US produced almost 30% of total cumulative global carbon emissions. This is especially notable given the fact that only 2% to 4% of the globe’s population called the United States home during that same period."Looks like we’re responsible for putting that donut in our mouth.
Climate Dieting as a Fad
Using a ‘diet’ as the metaphor for reducing carbon footprint is a tricky concept – how many diets are fads and better yet, how many people actually stick with a diet long term? If we are going to reduce our carbon output and slow climate change, then we need something more permanent than a fad diet. (Or, maybe the dieting analogy is completely appropriate if you think going green is just the latest fad and we’re not likely to turn the tide on climate change).
Many of the examples of what to do involve changing lightbulbs, but rarely does the author go into what you can do beyond that. The more helpful items were the random lists of “additional” items you can look into as these tended to be more helpful because they are the less-often mentioned items in conservation. That being said, this book is targeted at developed countries and the US in particular.
Green Tips
One favorite tip from the book: Try water in a pool heated that is exposed to the elements year-round. A typical pool heater uses 50,000 watts with another 2,000 watts for the pool pump. This amounts to 45,000 lb of CO2 emitted each year or the equivalent of operating THREE typical SUV’s year-round. (Moral: If you don’t have a solar system to heat this water, get one!)
The author also plays a fun game of ‘Find the Oil’ with his daughter where she goes through the house and lists each of the items that are produced with oil. The list she comes up with is pretty wide-reaching and informative.
How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
Each chapter includes lots of tables with information comparing energy use of a typical household, compared with what one should aim to use, but some of the tables are not exactly user-friendly. All of the tables can also be found online where users can download them and modify the tables with their personal energy consumption patterns.
Readers of The Climate Diet are told to aim for different “medal” categories as they complete more and more energy saving actions, and the book also says that there are three paths – the shortest cut diet plan, the shortcut diet plan, and the full home audit and comprehensive diet plan – but the author never really goes into these or explains what is included in each.
Dieting Alternatives
To be honest, the author should have saved the trees and instead used the Climate Diet analogy to develop something online, say similar to weight watchers, where participants can enter lifestyle data, any changes they make, their target ‘climate weight’ and watch as the program displays progress over time. The program could even offer new tips in the same way that diet programs offer new recipes, complete with what you can improve on, ways to do other energy saving items, and how to get more people involved.
Other How to Go Green Resources
Guides for How to Go Green
Ready, Set, Green!
Going Green book review
Published by EarthScan.
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- How to Go Green: Cocktails
- CFLs Could Curb Global Lighting Demand by 40% - and At What Cost?
- Run Cars on Green Electricity, Not Natural Gas
- Universities Taking the Initiative to Reduce Their Carbon Footprint
The Gettysburg Of US Climate Action: Clean Air Act Could/Could Not Be Used To Cost-Effectively Regulate Green House Gases?
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I wanted to let treehuggers know that there is really a Global warming diet book that is about food, It has a bunch of scary good recipes and clues you in to the environmental effect of different food choices. It is called The Global Warming Diet, Cool Recipes for a Hot Planet, and is written by a chef and a climate scientists. Check it out! It is pretty interesting, although I have not actually made any recipes yet.
Here is the URL
http://www.globalwarmingdiet.org/
That calculation of emissions for the pool heater needs more specification- which I assume the actual book would contain. Does it assume the heater is electric, or burning propane or other hydrocarbons on-site? Does it assume year-round pool heating, or seasonal? And for how many hours a day? In temperate climates a pool might be open 5 months a year, but the heater may only operate for a few weekends at the beginning and end of that range.
As the author of The Climate Diet, I would like to thank you for your interest in this book and make a few comments about your post. First, like many books on this topic, I provide hundreds of useful tips that readers can follow to reduce their climate footprints. What makes this book different from similar discussions on this topic is that my book allows people to measure the relative effects of lifestyle changes. For instance, turning down your heat by two degrees results in a much bigger cut in your emissions than buying some new energy saving appliance. What really counts is the amount or weight of your emissions reductions, not just the warm fuzzy feeling you might get from doing something 'green.' In order to have any chance to stablize global temperatures by 2100 the world must collectively reduce its emissions from 55 billion tons of CO2 equivalent to 20 billion tons by 2050. This will be almost impossible to achieve unless we all take personal responsibility for the emissions that are warming our world. The Climate Diet provides very detailed guidance on how to achieve this goal. My website includes a carbon calculator that you can use to customize your own carbon reduction strategy for any one of ten different countries (electricity emissions vary depending on how it is produced). You can log on at http://www.climatediet.com/tables.asp to use the free calculator.
Best,
Dr. Jonathan Harrington