Why should I care?

I've just finished reading a really excellent and thoroughly enjoyable (often laugh-out-loud) book called "Sustainable energy without the hot air", by David MacKay. Like many of the best books these days, it's available free to download in full, yet people are still buying it in large numbers, if the big display shelf where I found my copy, right in the front entrance of Flatchester's biggest bookshop, is anything to go by.

MacKay is (among many, other, things) a fine mathematician, and his book is in essence a plea for us to observe the laws of arithmetic when it comes to planning how to meet our future energy requirements. Think we should break our fossil fuel habit? MacKay agrees, but says we should be clear about how we're then going to arrange to produce as much energy as we consume. What combinations of better homebuilding and insulation, changes in travel habits, building facilities for wind and solar power, and so on, will actually add up? And what about nuclear? It looks as though very few organizations -- not only political parties, but environmental campaigning groups too -- have really done their sums; or if they have, they're a bit reticent about it. And MacKay has thoughtfully structured his material so that all the maths beyond GCSE level (taken by age 16 or so, for those outside the UK) is shoved into the second half of the book, so even our dear members of Parliament should be able to understand what he's getting at by reading the first half. In fact, given the importance of the issue and the clarity and good sense of the book, it seems to me there's no excuse for any of them not to do so. If they're not comfortable with GCSE-level maths, I don't want them representing me in the first place.

There's plenty there for the individual, too, to help us see how to lower our own carbon footprint. I've often allowed myself to be sabotaged before making changes by not knowing how important one potential action is compared to another. How many fewer miles would I need to drive in a year to save the same amount of fossil fuel energy as I would by turning down the house's central heating thermostat by one degree? And how does that compare to the energy saved (in feeding nitrogen-fertilised grain to livestock) by eating a vegan diet? What's the best way for me to rationalize the "stuff" in my life as it travels through the stages of the product life cycle as MacKay names them: from "goods" in the shop, to "clutter" in my house, to "rubbish" down at the tip?

I discovered answers to all those questions. The book is explicitly not about economics, just technical feasibility, but I also worked out that investing £180 pounds in nine light bulbs (not cheap, I know, but they are supposed to last many years) should save £75 per year on our household bills; where else can you get a return on investment of over 40%? And that even the more expensive things like solar panels, external wall insulation and (if you don't have a gas supply) air-source heat pumps could at least deliver the same kind of returns as you can get these days by putting money the bank.

Maybe the cleverest thing about this book, though, is that it's not mainly about climate change. MacKay makes the point that there are actually three compelling reasons for us to switch away from fossil fuels. Climate change is certainly one, but there's also energy security (do we want to be always getting our essential supplies from unstable or potentially hostile parts of the world?) and "peak oil": the fact that fossil fuels (in liquid form, anyway) are going to run out before too long, and increase hugely in price long before they do that.

I wonder, in fact, if environmental campaigners should adopt MacKay's broader emphasis more generally. Of course, climate change is the really big issue; of the three, only it has the potential to topple our civilisation and even wipe out our species altogether. But precisely because of that, many people are too frightened to pay it proper attention, and erect well-worn psychological defences: ignoring it, joking about it, or pretending it's still "just a theory". There's also the undeniable fact that whatever I do -- and even, whatever my country, acting alone, does -- it probably won't make a lot of difference. And anyway, the really catastrophic consequences will probably be suffered by our grandchildren, not by us. Because of all this, the whole issue tends to be surrounded by what Douglas Adams called an SEP field. SEP stands for "Somebody Else's Problem", and the field in question renders things invisible when they're too scary or too far outside our everyday experience for us to make sense of.

But your country or mine can do something to safeguard its own energy security in the face of political disruption and peak oil; and we have to, or we will experience the consequences not in two generations time but in the next few years. If I live in some kind of democracy, maybe I can even influence that a little bit. And unlike the prospect of severe climate disruption, I can quite easily imagine (especially if I lived in Britain in the 1970s, or eastern Europe much more recently) what regular power cuts would be like. Disruptive, unpleasant, well worth avoiding, but mostly not catastrophic. The kind of threat we can get our heads around and act to avoid.

I think a switch of emphasis like this is a much better way to deal with people's terror and feelings of powerlessness than the sugar coating and manipulativeness typified by the futerra approach in the UK which I wrote about a few months ago. If you don't want to think about climate change, OK, but you should still care about sustainable energy for other reasons, and there are things you can do, and things you can pressure your elected representatives to do, that will help to solve the energy problem, and by a happy coincidence, be just what the climate needs too.

Next step: can someone write a book on environmental economics that deals with the money side of things as well as MacKay has dealt with the technical aspects?