The carbon offset market is awash with guides, policy manuals and technical specs, which can put most of us to sleep after the first chapter. While it’s important to offset your carbon emissions – that’s the whole basis of our existence – making your life close to carbon neutral in other ways should come first. And figuring out how to do that shouldn’t be boring.
To help you learn how to put your lifestyle, home and community on a “carbon diet” Carbon Catalog has gathered an essential reading list bound to hold your interest. Because we do advocate consuming less and recycling, when you can, if you buy the books, be sure to share them with your family, friends – and at the end of the line – your community library.
The Carbon Buster’s Home Energy Handbook: Slowing Climate Change and Saving Money, by Godo Stoyke
Save Money and Go Lower Than Kyoto – It will take some investment, but climate change can be avoided through using appropriate technology in the home, advocates this book. Offering a guide for helping families account for their carbon emissions and ways to reduce them, this book systematically helps you analyze your energy costs and how to choose effective energy efficient options. Should one buy a hybrid car or solar panels for the roof? Is a fridge that costs $500 and uses 800 kWh of energy per year a good buy? Asking all the questions you have in mind, this book lets individuals quickly assess what products are a good deal for both the family unit and the environment. The author writes that this book enables readers to dramatically reduce their carbon emissions far below the levels targeted under the Kyoto Protocol, while savings can amount to about $15K over five years. ~Buy
You Can Prevent Global Warming (and Save Money!): 51 Easy Ways, by Jeffrey Langholz and Kelly Turner
51 Ways To Leave Your Greenhouse Gas Lover – This essential easy-to-read “tips” book has been on environmentalists’ shelves for years. Now updated with information on hybrid cars, the book provides low-cost advice in lowering an individual’s carbon dioxide emissions. Authors say that if you follow the tips in the book, which don’t need to be read in any particular order, you’ll save $2,000 and prevent 25,000 pounds of CO2e from the entering the atmosphere every year. Tips include how to weather-strip your home, how to buy and use automatic thermostats, how to get off junk mail lists, cleaning refrigerator coils, and how to start using carbon offsets. A background and hard numbers are included with every tip. One reader says he’s cut his electricity bill in half. Ready for the challenge? ~Buy
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, by Bill McKibben
Why Being Rich Isn’t Good for You or the Planet – The wealth of today’s society has brought us to the point where we drive our private cars into gated communities, and run to our private rooms where we are locked away, alone, working on the Internet. Seems that the more we get rich, the lonelier we become. This situation isn’t good for our health, and it isn’t good for the environment either, reasons Bill McKibben who proposes some alternatives for the future. More philosophical in nature than our other choices, McKibben isn’t preaching the ‘money won’t make you happy’ nonsense, but helps us look at ourselves in a mirror to see how our “hyper-individualized world” contributes to processes such as global warming. This book is good for curling up with on the couch, as food for thought before you take action. ~Buy
Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming, by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn
Saving the World and Making Millions Are Not Mutually Exclusive – Going beyond the individual and extending into the big world of business, Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn suggest ways for humanity to deal with climate change while creating a prosperous economic future at the same time. The earth has its limits, Krupp and Horn spell out in this book – but these very limits can spur economic growth and ecological prosperity. Offering a quick overview of the clean energy industry, this book highlights the technologies that could generate fortunes for entrepreneurs, and visionaries who fund them. This is a great introduction for neewbies to renewable and alternative industries. Maybe it will ignite in you a new idea? ~Buy
The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills To Stop Climate Change, by David de Rothschild
A Survival Guide Good for Parties and Boy Scouts – This tongue-in-cheek masterpiece is the companion guide to the series of Live Earth concerts that took place around the world in 2007. Providing 24 hours of non-stop concerts and education about global warming and climate change, this book continues the quest: It gives you 77 skills for stopping climate change, while having fun at the same time. A witty guide, readers have compared it to a hybrid between a Boy Scout’s manual, and a WorldChanging publication, merged with the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. In instruction manual style, the guide offers tips as well as scientific and environmental facts. ~Buy
How to Live a Low Carbon Life, by Chris Goodall
How You Can Pull the Planet From the Abyss – It will take the concerted actions of individuals and not governments, that will reverse global warming. These are the thoughts laid out in Chris Goodall’s book. He believes that ordinary, every day actions made by people like you and me will be the driving force behind stopping climate change. Walking us through the perils of a non-consolidated carbon offsets market, Goodall offers alternatives to offsetting, which if taken on in a global scale may be able to save the planet. The optimistic tone and flavor of this book is an antidote to doomsday prophesies, and helps us feel that we can take global warming into our own hands. ~Buy
