Our world is in a mess. The challenges of climate change, inequality, hunger and a global pandemic mean our way of life seems more imperilled and society more divided than ever; but economics can help!

From parenting to organ donation, housing to anti-social behaviour, economics provides the tools we need to fix the biggest issues of today. Far from being a means to predict the stock market or enrich the elite, economics provides a lens through which we can better understand how things work, design clever solutions and create the conditions in which we can all flourish.

With a healthy dose of optimism, and packed with stories of economics in everyday situations, Erik Angner demonstrates the methods he and his fellow economists use to help improve our lives and the society in which we live. He shows us that economics can be a powerful force for good, awakening the possibility of a happier, more just and more sustainable world.

Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet’s slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal.

He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions-suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise.

As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

The climate is the fundamental issue of our time, yet it seems we can barely agree on what is really going on, let alone what needs to be done. We urgently need facts, not opinions. Insights, not statistics.

The Carbon Almanac is a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between hundreds of writers, researchers, thinkers, and leaders that focuses on what we know, what has come before, and what might happen next. With thousands of data points, articles and charts explaining carbon’s impact on everything in our society, from our the economy to extreme weather events, it is the definitive source for facts and the basis for a global movement to fight climate change.

This book isn’t what the oil companies, marketers, activists, or politicians want you to believe. This is what’s really happening, right now. Our planet is in trouble, and no one concerned group, corporation, country, or hemisphere can
address this on its own. We are in this together. And it’s not too late for concerted, collective action for change.

When a beanbag sent thousands of polystyrene balls flying  through her garden, Kate Hughes decided to make a break  with the throwaway society.

She and her husband transformed the lives of their ordinary  family of four. They ditched plastic, shunned supermarkets,  cooked all meals from scratch, bought only second-hand  clothes, and made their own cleaning agents. Then they went  deeper – greening every aspect of their home life, from their  gas and electricity to their car, from their money to their IT.

The Hugheses have achieved the ‘zero waste’ goal of sending  nothing to landfill. Now they are going even further?

Told with refreshing humility and humour, this eye-opening  story shows that a well-lived life doesn’t have to come wrapped  in plastic. Packed with handy tips, it reveals much about what  makes a fulfilling modern family – and how readers can  empower themselves to preserve the climate, forests and seas.  And, heart-warmingly, how that can lead to a more relaxing life.

Extract

Cooking our own meals

We were starting to realise that making the journey was leading to more questions than answers, more grey areas, misinformation and conflicts of interest than we ever imagined – and that was just about food. We hadn’t even got started on anything else that came into our home yet.

Take a single, uncontroversial ingredient, let’s say peppers. Should we buy them grown in a UK hothouse or ones trucked in  from Spain? What if the Spanish ones are organic? Or the only UK option is wrapped in plastic? Which is better for the environment? Or at least less harmful? If we ever want to eat peppers again without negatively impacting the planet in some way are we going to have to grow our own? Because self-sufficiency wasn’t really part of the plan….

All we could do was dive in and hope we didn’t drown in the detail as we swam around looking for food that worked for us and the planet. We started with the problem of transport because food mileage was a well established measure that meant we could actually make some decisions based on numbers for once. Or, at least, we thought we could.

Three quarters of all the fruit and veg now eaten in the UK is imported. Almost all the fruit we eat has been grown overseas, and soft fruit in particular is flown in. It turns out that the UK only produces half of all the food that is consumed on these shores – which is somewhat patriotically disconcerting as well as practically unsustainable.

One of our family stories is the recollection of the first banana my great uncle ever tasted after WW2, shipped from the other side of the world. We were very aware that bananas came from overseas.

But the fact that such a vast proportion of the apples eaten in Britain are imported from South Africa, or at best France, when the fruit grows very well in the orchards you can see from near our house seemed to be absurd.

The obvious solution appeared to be only to buy food produced not just in the UK but as close to us as possible.

That immediately threw up two questions.

The first we were becoming increasingly familiar with. Were we really prepared to give up things we took great pleasure in for the sake of an unquantifiable, but undoubtedly minuscule effect? Or even just to settle for not adding to the runaway levels of damage that our disconnected food shop was causing each and every day?

But the second question was whether a straightforward food mile approach was even a worthwhile aim. When I put the question of food miles to Riverford Organic Farmers, the sustainably produced veg box people, they told me that for most of the year our carbon impact would be smaller if we bought organic tomatoes trucked in from Spain than those heated thanks to fossil fuels in a UK hothouse.

That means the answer has to be to eat food grown in the UK at the time of year it is traditionally produced. We finally arrived at a robust solution – seasonal, native eating.

Buy the book to carry on  reading

Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet’s slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal.

He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions-suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise.

As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.