George Monbiot has attained an iconic status among English-speaking progressives. His ability to see through the sophistry of governments, corporations and their various apologists has provided us with a range of new political insights. In recent years he has devoted many of his columns in the Guardian to the defining problem of our era, climate change, exposing the cant of politicians and dirty dealing of the fossil fuel lobby, deploying both forensic research skills and elegant prose. Monbiot’s book on climate change was therefore keenly anticipated by his readers. Like all of those who truly face up to the implications of climate change science, Monbiot is exasperated at the timidity of those in government who claim to take global warming seriously. Even environmentalists, he suggests, refuse to confront the enormity of the task.

Heat is Monbiot’s search to find the answer to climate change.footnote¹ Over several chapters he considers the problem areas—energy wastage, electricity generation, land transport, aviation—and argues that Britain can cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent. The argument is presented as a kind of personal intellectual odyssey, describing where he went, what he read, how his thinking evolved, which ingrained assumptions he had to discard and the emotional turmoil of getting to the end. The book might be read as a detective story in which the author and protagonist must solve this crucial puzzle. By the end of it, Monbiot believes he has found a ‘workable solution’ for slashing Britain’s emissions, and that it is ‘generally applicable’ to other countries.

There is a deeper message in Heat, one that is anathema to fossil fuel lobbyists—not to mention neoclassical economists and hand-wringing politicians. Despite the comforting arguments of some environmentalists—and Nicholas Stern, in his 2006 report for the uk Treasury—that we can tackle climate change without major disruption, in truth cutting the world’s greenhouse gases by the necessary amounts is almost intractable. We can only avoid catastrophe—including millions dying in the Third World—if we radically change the way we in the rich countries go about our daily lives. Above all, we must abandon our comfortable belief in progress. There could be no greater challenge to growth fetishism and our deepest held assumptions about progress, nor any graver threat to the power of the ‘wealth creators’.

Are we in the rich countries of the world capable of making such a psychological transition? The glib answer is that we simply must. Yet such an environmental imperative must conquer a more powerful force. Our profligate consumption is no longer aimed at meeting material needs but at reproducing ourselves psychologically. In modern consumer capitalism, consumption activity is the primary means by which we create an identity and sustain a fragile sense of self. If, in order to solve climate change, we are asked to change the way we consume, then we are being asked to change who we are—to experience a sort of death. So desperately do we cling to our manufactured selves that we fear relinquishing them more than we fear the consequences of climate change. This helps to explain the chasm between the complacency of ordinary people and the rising panic among climate scientists and clear-eyed environmentalists. Monbiot understands this, and some of the most compelling passages of Heat explore the psychological obstacles to saving the planet. The campaign to maintain a liveable climate is unique:

it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves.footnote²

Having begun by characterizing humankind’s relationship with fossil fuels as a Faustian pact, Monbiot then turns to the climate change denial industry. The political campaign to persuade governments to take action to prevent global warming has been conducted mainly by environmental organizations, based on the work of scientists around the world. But by the time global warming was beginning to be recognized as the gravest threat to humanity, environmentalism had given rise to its opposite, a virulently hostile coalition of industrialists, right-wing commentators and conservative politicians. From the outset the evidence for global warming and the climate crisis has been resisted by the tide of anti-environmentalism, itself powered by the same energies that drove anti-communism before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most recently the argument has been put by Margaret Thatcher’s favourite chancellor, Nigel Lawson. Attacking Nicholas Stern, Lawson claimed that environmentalism ‘is profoundly hostile to capitalism and the market economy’.footnote³ This is the nub of the matter. The logic of the sceptics—in the right-wing think tanks, the conservative media and the White House—is as follows: environmentalists are the enemies of capitalism; what they advocate must be contrary to the interests of capitalism; climate scientists who provide the evidence that supports their views are also enemies of capitalism; accepting the evidence of global warming means giving in to anti-capitalists; therefore, we must not accept the science of climate change and will seek out any shred of evidence that appears to contradict it.

This is more than an ideological conviction; for some it borders on a religious one. When asked in 2001 if President Bush would be urging Americans to curb their energy use, his spokesman Ari Fleischer replied: ‘That’s a big “no”’. He went on to declare that wasting energy is akin to godliness: