Search Results

Manifesto For A New World Order

Visionary George Monbiot''s road map for a global democratic revolution.
George Monbiot is known to millions for his newspaper commentaries, which are widely circulated on the Internet. Monbiot''s "Manifesto for a New World Order" offers a plan for transforming the world into a decent place for all. All over the planet, the rich get richer while the poor are overtaken by debt and disaster. The world is run by a handful of executives who make the most important of decisions, concerning war, peace, debt, development, and the balance of trade. Without democracy at the global level, the rest of us are left in the dark. George Monbiot shows us how to turn on the light.
Emphasizing not only that things ought to change but also revealing how to change them, Monbiot develops an interlocking set of proposals that mark him as the most realistic utopian of our time. With detailed discussions of what a world parliament might look like, how trade can be organized fairly, and how underdeveloped nations can leverage their debt to obtain real change, "Manifesto for a New World Order" offers a truly global perspective, a defense of democracy, and an understanding of power and how it might be captured from those unfit to retain it.

Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning

Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning marks an important moment in our civilization''s thinking about global warming. The question is no longer Is climate change actually happening? but What do we do about it? George Monbiot offers an ambitious and far-reaching program to cut our carbon dioxide emissions to the point where the environmental scales start tipping back-away from catastrophe. Though writing with a "spirit of optimism," Monbiot does not pretend it will be easy. The only way to avoid further devastation, he argues, is a 90% cut in CO2 emissions in the rich nations of the world by 2030. In other words, our response will have to be immediate, and it will have to be decisive. In every case he supports his proposals with a rigorous investigation into what works, what doesn''t, how much it costs, and what the problems might be. He wages war on bad ideas as energetically as he promotes good ones. And he is not afraid to attack anyone-friend or foe-whose claims are false or whose figures have been fudged. After all, there is no time to waste. As Monbiot has said himself, "we are the last generation that can make this happen, and this is the last possible moment at which we can make it happen." George Monbiot is the best-selling author of The Age of Consent and Captive State, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed, and No Man''s Land. In 1995, Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), and East London (environmental science). Currentlyvisiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University, he writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.

Heat: How To Stop The Planet From Burning

"We are the most fortunate generation that has ever lived. And we are the most fortunate generation that ever will."
-George Monbiot

What George Monbiot means by this is that our civilization has leveraged the awesome power of fossil energy to create a world that only a short time ago would have been nearly unimaginable. Our health, our wealth, our leisure, our freedom from tyranny and struggle, are all benefits bestowed upon us by harnessed energy of oil and coal.

But the price of these gifts has been a growing environmental crisis. Our atmosphere is filling up with carbon dioxide, which is released by the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide traps the sun's heat, causing the temperature of our planet to rise. The reason why future generations are unlikely to be as fortunate as us is that fossil energy is just too good to be true. We cannot go on enjoying the benefits of this dirty energy. We must either address the problem, which will be a tough challenge involving many sacrifices, or ignore it, with unthinkable consequences.

George Monbiot's Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning marks an important moment in our civilization's thinking about global warming. The question is no longer whether climate change is actually happening. The question is what to do about it. Monbiot offers an ambitious and far-reaching program to cut our carbon dioxide emissions to the point where the environmental scales start tipping away from catastrophe. (But not before he devotes a chapter to unmasking the vested interests that have spent fortunes funding the specious science of the climate change deniers.)

He does not pretend it will be easy. The threshold for disaster, he argues, is a rise of two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. Past two degrees, science tells us, the ability to control climate change passes out of our hands. At that point, the world's forests will fall into decline, changing cloud formation patterns and releasing the billions of tons of carbon the trees store. Past two degrees, the permafrost begins to thaw, releasing billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas far more destructive than CO2. At the same point, the polar ice begins to melt, affecting ocean currents and water levels. This is called a "positive feedback loop," and it means that once we've passed two degrees, nothing can be done to stop it rising to three. And once we hit three, four will follow.

Two degrees is also the point at which the globe slides towards increasing water scarcity and, eventually, food deficit.

And the fact is, we're already seeing the consequences of climate change around the globe: collapsing ice shelves, the failure of the cyclical rains in Eastern Africa, drought in Australia, the spread of tropical diseases into new territory as temperatures rise, pollution of aquifers with salt water in Bangladesh. Global temperatures have already risen 0.6 of a degree, causing huge damage to the natural environment and inflicting suffering on vast numbers of people.

The only way to avoid further devastation, and forestall the catastrophe of positive feedback, Monbiot argues, is a 90% cut in CO2 emissions in the rich nations of the world by 2030. In other words, our response will have to be immediate, and it will have to be decisive.

But where to start?

Monbiot starts at home, where we have most control. Though he draws his examples from the UK, and commends Canadians for our superior building standards, he makes a damning case that the buildings we live and work in squander energy. Since our heat and electricity produce CO2, nearly every bit of heat and power we waste (like nearly every bit of heat and power we use) commits us to greenhouse gas emissions. Monbiot finds ways for us to build, and live, so much better that we can cut emissions at home by the required 90%.

He then looks at the source of our electricity, and evaluates the arguments for both local micro-generation (for example, solar photovoltaic panels and small wind turbines), and renewable energy for the grid. His research leads him to some unexpected discoveries, but he finds a way to trim our emissions by the necessary margin.

Another obvious source of CO2 emissions is our transportation - the cars we drive and the flights we take. A little ingenuity, he argues, will allow us to deal with the former. But the latter, he acknowledges, is shaping up to be the Achilles heel of all efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

A couple of less obvious major sources of CO2 are the retail and construction industries. Big box stores, with their inefficient designs, their racks of heaters, air conditioners, and blazing lights (to say nothing of the sprawling parking lots full of cars that drive back and forth on shopping trips), are simply inconsistent with a low-carbon future. But Monbiot has a thoughtful and surprisingly simple solution. Similarly, the concrete industry, that backbone of all new construction, emits millions of tons each year as a consequence of the immense heat and chemical processes involved in the manufacturing process. Though the solution here is not as ready to hand, it is still possible.

In short, the scale of the changes before us is staggering, as is the size of the problem. But Monbiot ends on a note of hope. We have shown ourselves to be capable of enormous ingenuity and great feats of cooperation and sacrifice when confronted with a serious threat. The Second World War provides countless examples of citizens and engineers doing the supposedly impossible in order to get the job done. Fighting climate change will not require young men to die in battle, but a failure to tackle the problem urgently and with all the determination we can muster will cost uncountable lives. There is no reason to think we will do less when faced with a threat to the sustainability of all life on the planet than we did when faced with a threat to our political and ethical values.

Monbiot argues there is no time to waste. As he has said himself, "we are the last generation that can make this happen, and this is the last possible moment at which we can make it happen."


From the Hardcover edition.

Bring On The Apocalypse: Collected Writing

A new fusillade of provocative thinking from the author of the bestselling Heat.

With Heat, George Monbiot confirmed his standing as one of the most important voices in the war against global warming. But as Bring on the Apocalypse makes clear, Monbiot is far from being a one-issue thinker. In this collection of his journalism, none of which has been published in Canada before, he tackles a wide range of issues drawn from recent headlines, and does so with his familiar fierce intelligence and superb skills as a writer.

Grouped by theme into "Arguments with" science, political power, war, religion, economics, and culture, these pieces crackle with intellectual energy and frequently give off sparks of fury. Always, though, their power is rooted in profound knowledge, a solid set of principles, and palpable sincerity. The Globe and Mail said of Heat that it "contains more intellectual challenges by the page than the Canadian media does in a year." For Bring on the Apocalypse, with its concise, intense broadsides against everything from climate change deniers, to the fundamentalist "Christian Taliban," to the evils of teen magazines, and what continued interest in the Loch Ness monster says about our attitude to real ones, make that "by the paragraph."

Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice

See all 7 Used + Rare copies from $17.56

Prices updated daily. May not reflect current price, depending on availability.

Captive State: The Corporate Takeover Of Britain

See all 15 Used + Rare copies from $6.47

Prices updated daily. May not reflect current price, depending on availability.

Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain

See all 8 Used + Rare copies from $16.89

Prices updated daily. May not reflect current price, depending on availability.

Age Of Consent

See all 20 Used + Rare copies from $6.99

Prices updated daily. May not reflect current price, depending on availability.

A manifesto for a new world order.

Having made a hugely significant contribution to the increasingly irrefutable, if alarming, diagnosis of the ills of early 21st-century consumerist culture and its free-market myths, George Monbiot now sets out to offer something more constructive, a set of proposals - political, democratic, economic, environmental - that might effect the cultural change that many in the West (not to mention those on the outside of the West looking in) now want but scarcely know how to make happen.

The Age of Consent is provocative, brave, even utopian. But, with most of the 20th century's Big Ideas dead in the gutter, it's time for a book that can be a touchstone for real debate about the political and economic presumptions and prejudices on which our society has rested since World War Two.

No Man's Land:An Investigative Journey Through Kenya & Tanzania

See all 7 Used + Rare copies from $12.69

Prices updated daily. May not reflect current price, depending on availability.