I did not finish the book. This is an eARC given through NetGalley.

I was excited to read books tackling the environment, given I am an environmental science major. But the presentation discouraged me to read: the figures and tables, which the texts referred to, were not shown and the layout of the pages was all over the place. I understand that it was not a final proof but somehow, those made reading harder.

I am familiar with the topics presented. I am looking to a more interesting way of presenting the topics since the book will not only be read by experts but also by the general population.

I still plan to get back to this and if I do, I will be updating this review.

"I think we can each have far more impact than most people assume but we need to get a lot smarter at understanding which kinds of things make a difference and which don't." This statement, made near the beginning of "There Is No Planet B," tidily encapsulates not only the reason for this book's existence, but also my feelings on so many issues and challenges of our day. Bringing the very big issue of climate change into the limited laps of everyday people, it is, in many ways, an amazing resource.

This is primarily due to its form, which is a Q & A. It's more than 130 questions that everyday people might ask about energy, travel, and other contributors to climate change, such as business and technology, and the answers to those questions. Some questions don't seem to have anything to do with climate change or the impact a single person can have on it, such as, "What should I invest in?" But Berners-Lee manages to show that, even with our investments, we can support a healthier climate.

However, some questions stray from the topic of climate change and individual impact entirely, which reveals that this book isn't just about climate change, as its title would seem to suggest. Indeed, Berners-Lee himself states that he realized that talking about climate change is a "multi-disciplinary challenge" and part of the "rich soup of environmental, political, economic, technological, scientific, and social issues of the day." Thus, if you, as the reader, are seeking a treatise just on climate change, you will not find it here.

He asks, for example, why most Americans are so much poorer than most Italians. The answer to that questions has less to do with climate change and more to do with generalizations about maldistribution of wealth. While this is an issue many recognize as important, its inclusion weakens the case for impact on climate change by the everyday person. It accomplishes the author's objectives, but may not provide those looking for facts and figures about the need to do something about climate change what they need. It will, however, give someone just generally curious about how to live more earth-friendly a good place to start.

Regarding the aforementioned "facts and figures," I felt that the source materials in general were provided in a less-than-effective way. While the everyday person might not mind that the sources are not provided in the endnotes in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style (the industry standard for books like this), they might care that the exact sources are not always listed nor are they always quoted clearly. Endnote #18 for pages 57-60 attributes an entire section of text to The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, but does not indicate--through quotation marks or any other device--which exact text in that text came from the source quoted. Such omissions lessen the credibility of this book slightly. Those fighting to get everyday people more involved in lessening their carbon footprint cannot afford the loss of any credibility.

Indeed, the higher the credibility and professionalism of any book like this, the more likely it is to get into more hands and make more of a difference. Thus, I would hope that any subsequent printings of this book would address those shortcomings so that it becomes a stronger force for good.

But it is not just technical matters that weaken this book's potential; there are also stylistic and grammatical problems. Although I reviewed an ARC, in which most, but not all, typos, omissions, and mistakes should have been edited out and fixed, there were still so many as to distract from the important points of the book. These were things like:
--poor phrasing and pronoun slips, such as "How humanity has fed now and how we can do this better in the future. What can be done and what can everyone do?" The "we" in the second phrase of the first sentence is implied to be the same as "humanity," so this sentence would have been more complete and consistent and less redundant as: "How is humanity fed now and can this be done better? By whom?"

Along those same lines, a long passage on page 10 (location 259 on my Kindle) indicates another way in which this book might be strengthened: "Our land and sea need managing from many different perspectives at once. We need to feed a growing population with a healthy, tasty low carbon diet. But we need to achieve this whilst preserving or improving the biodiversity that is currently haimorrhaging and despite the reductions in land fertility that we may be causing, not least through climate change. We also need to fend off a looming antibiotics crisis and an explosion of plastic pollution that has crept up on us in just the past 50 years and is now with us forever as far as we can tell. As if all this wasn't enough, even though we don't really know to to do it yet, it is becoming increasingly clear that we will need land to have a role in putting carbon back in the ground. Oh yes, and we also need it for living space and recreation."

This passage alone is dense with very big assertions, generalizations, and claims, which together might overwhelm the every reader, the audience of this book. In my opinion, the author's opinion about how to solve these problems would have been bolstered by the inclusion of sources showing that improving biodiversity has a chance of solving them. Otherwise, the provision of one man's opinion, no matter how informed it is, might do little to truly swat the book's audience.

--lack of correlation between certain subjects and climate change. Although, as I mentioned, the author's purpose isn't to discuss climate change exclusively, I think readers would be more likely to read the book from cover to cover if they understood in the question itself its relationship to the important issue it addresses. In other words, the everyday reader might just go to the questions they themselves are asking and not think to ask the more in-depth questions that the detailed answers inevitably bring up. Simple rewording might improve readability.

Overall, this book is a helpful, informative, and timely read, but there is much that could be done to improve its place in the list of resources available to the average person to inform their own activism, in whatever form it takes.

This book presents good facts, which everyone should be aware of.
However, the phrasing felt very preachy. I understand that we need to change our way of doing things, but there is no need to scold the people who are reading - if they are reading this book it probably means they want to be more educated and change the way they treat the environment.

There Is No Planet B is a guidebook to reducing one's impact on the Earth and explores whether certain lifestyle changes make a measurable impact on decreasing emissions/reducing climate change. One of the best aspects of this book is the reliance on numbers and figures to illustrate a person's impact. Unfortunately, I found this book rather dull; as an environmental scientist, I was familiar with about 90% of the contents of the book and found myself skimming through it. For that reason, I would only recommend There Is No Planet B to those who aren't familiar with climate change and environmental issues.

Mike Berners-Lee has written a book —There is no Planet B —about Climate Change that lays out the problems of human impact on the earth and its upcoming issues and what WE as individuals, government and businesses can do to slow down and make our impact on the earth more friendly for our children, grandchildren and beyond. This is a blueprint that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez should’ve borrowed from and turned to as a realistic plan for narrowing the industrial footprint. Not just what she thinks should be stopped or changed, but HOW it can be changed in simple steps and larger steps taken globally. This is a well written book, easy to read, easy to understand, and even has a teasing sense of humor to it.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee — One of the world’s leading experts on carbon emissions addresses some tough questions in his new book and shows us how we can move forward in a practical, effective way. It’s a book full of hard facts, important analysis, tough choices, positive inspiration and a surprising amount of humor.

Disappointingly, this “handbook” on the world’s most important issue, bar none, saving the planet, has left me no better educated and really quite irritated by the preachy tone and naive, going on delusional, view of humanity of the author. If these are the answers, we are doomed. I’ve always been pretty green - I reduce, reuse, recycle, spend thoughtfully, abhor waste, and worry about climate change. Like most, I could do more, and was looking for realistic ideas, but didn’t find much here.

Broken down into chapters, starting with food supplies, then energy use, transport, technology etc, this started well, and I found his writing style initially engaging, but found the tendency to give an extreme example to prove or disprove every theory just confusing rather than amusing, and it meant the salient points got lost amongst the silliness. He does at least propose goals for individuals to make a difference, such as reducing meat and dairy consumption, minimising flying, buying an ebike etc, but there is nothing new, or original.

Unfortunately for my trust in the whole book, he doesn’t even touch on the most important issue of all, population control, until well past halfway, and then only to suggest that 15 billion people could be okay as long as we all lived frugally and harmoniously. He whispers, once, that people should only have children if they really want them, and proclaims his virtue at having stopped at two, without daring to suggest that this is what everyone should do. I’m sorry but I’m with David Attenborough that it’s time for a One Child World.

He seems perfectly fine with Africa heading for 2 billion people, with no way to feed them other than the Americas shipping over their excess. Sometimes I think Thanos had the right idea, and that half the population disappearing painlessly would be the best solution, rather than the famine, displacement, war, storms, floods, fires and mudslides that are coming, due to our unsustainably enlarging population. On balance, humankind may be unsaveable, but it’s the thought that all the tigers, whales, polar bears, frogs, penguins, bees, and the rest, will be gone too, that breaks my heart.

He states that a couple choosing not to have children so they can go on skiing holidays is just as bad for the planet as those who do reproduce, but unlike all the other unintended consequences, (and there was a lot on rebound effects of various interventions) at least that couple’s harm is finite, and ends with them: other people don’t have more children because others haven’t, they have as many as they can/want for themselves, who will have more, and every generation uses more resources.

He then goes really off topic to talk about how unpleasant prisons are, and how much better the Norwegian system is, because it makes prison a nice place to be. He claims not to align with any particular political colour, but he’s basically a complete Watermelon (NB in NZ as in the UK, unlike the USA, red is the colour of the left, and this guy is to the left of Corbin and Sanders.) He’s a proponent of the Universal Basic Income (or Citizen’s Wage) despite good evidence that it’s a failure, and despite espousing democracy as the best political system, has beliefs that sound like good old fashioned communism. I do expect that your opinion of this book would be heavily influenced by your place on the political spectrum, but as a pragmatic centrist who believes effort should be rewarded this book started to really annoy me.

His belief in humanity is sweet but so unrealistic as to be laughable: that the planet will be saved by everyone being kind to one another, and willingly sharing resources across nations, when the ultimate dream of most global citizens is a massive lottery win so they can quit work and buy massive cars, houses, boats and planes. The most powerful country on the planet willingly selected a climate change denying pathological narcissist sexual predator as it’s leader, and the author still thinks people can make the right choices to save it?

At one point he states, as a fundamental principle “All people are inherently equal in their humanity. With this comes the principle that all should be allowed, encouraged and enabled to live their lives in whatever way they find meaningful, provided this is negotiated alongside the equal rights of others to do likewise.” I could not disagree more, there are lots of people who are subhuman and should not be allowed normal human rights - like those who hunt animals for “sport”, child abusers, arsonists, anti-vaxxers, I could go on... but by this stage he was so far from the topic I wondered if I’d stumbled into a different book.

It’s not all bad, there were plenty of interesting facts hidden amongst the hyperbole. Unfortunately the ARC I received was so poorly formatted that the graphics and tables were incomprehensible. I assume this will have been fixed for publication. My Kindle copy ended (thankfully) at about 70% then there are notes, references (not as many as I would’ve expected”, repeats of some earlier sections and a glossary to hammer home the main points, which was a useful wrap-up but I was over it by then.
I’m sorry to seem so negative as the intent of the book is so important. I don’t often write such ranty reviews but this one really wound me up.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc in exchange for an honest review.
The book is available now.

Book and Film Globe review by Michael Giltz
Mike Berners-Lee is an expert on carbon footprints but also a generalist and a magpie of information, especially when it comes to climate change. He’s here to tell you–quite correctly–that climate change is a MASSIVE problem that poses an existential threat to life as we know it.

But he also wants to say, a la Douglas Adams, DON’T PANIC. You can do lots of little things in your daily life to “make a difference.” Acting in small ways adds up and changes your thinking. It reminds you, and everyone around you, about the crisis we face.

With that in mind, Berners-Lee (the brother of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web and I assume lords it over Mike at every family dinner) has delivered his new work, a paperback and e-book release cheekily titled There Is No Planet B. With the time remaining before irreversible disaster, a stage-left exit via Tesla Rocket to Alpha Centauri or parts unknown isn’t going to happen. You go to war with the planet you have, so to speak So we must act. Hence the subtitle: “A Handbook For The Make Or Break Years.”

This topic proves to be so massive that it positively swamps Berners-Lee. Through his semi-panicked lens, to tackle climate change, you must tackle food and transportation and our consumerist society and inequality and global politics and much more. Planet B rushes through complex topics, pivots to solutions and then offers up a call to action on each issue for everyone from countries to corporations, right down to you and me in our daily lives.

It’s an impossible task, really, and easy to mock. For example, Berners-Lee says that when considering a purchase of seafood you should get to know your local fishmonger and brightly ask them, “What are the environmental and ethical issues to consider with this particular type of fish?” As a British person, he actually knows his fishmonger.

At the other end of the spectrum, he blithely tosses off the idea that a business that exists primarily to make a profit is unhelpful. He argues for a Universal Basic Income, calls for an end to hunger, and admits reaching a worldwide deal to effectively fight climate change. This will require richer countries to learn to share with poorer countries. He demands “a sense of international fair play the world has never yet known.” Suddenly, I’m the one panicking.

Berners-Lee ping-pongs from the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution to wasteful packaging of take-out food. He covers intrinsic and extrinsic values while also discussing the problems facing journalists, the meaning of truth, and the carbon cost of shipping food by boat versus growing it in a local greenhouse.

In short, he tosses every stray thought he’s ever had connected to global warming into the Planet B mix. I couldn’t decide whether I should be recycling, storming the barricades, or, more likely, building the barricades with recyclable material and then storming them.

I agree with most every word he says, appreciate the effort and even learned a little here and there. But I’m certain this will overwhelm and confuse the casual reader and be far too vague for the informed reader. I fear this book isn’t worth the carbon footprint it will cost to print and ship, even in paperback. And that’s the inconvenient truth.

(Cambridge University Press, February 26, 2019)

-- Michael Giltz

This is a strange book. It is about our tryst with destiny; our deeds in last 200 years are endengering our own survival.
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Author thinks that thinkers like Elon musk who believe we can inhabit other planets; is not possible in near future when temperature rise of even 2 degrees is going to create water grave and ice coffin for humanity.
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If we see it in short term like 40-50 years it might not be clear but imagine after 100 years; our children are going to face hostile earth.
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First half of the book is data overloaded which may put the reader off radar, but if one navigates through it nice part sets in second half.
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There is lots of useful information but may be its little overdosed.
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Each section has an important question about environment which author tries to answer sincerely.
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It covers wide topics like ideal job, ideal food, aviation, carbon footprint of various deeds we do, good food practices, economical disparities.
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It streses that economics and political thinking should change to slow the global warming.
. It also discusses the new era thinking that should be prompted in this century to slow down environmental collapse.
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Overall it gives lots of relevant insights into our psychology that should change to start any improvements in present situation.
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Thanks to netgalley and author for review copy.

This a terrible book! It was a rehash of everything the author has ever written about global warming. If you do get this book just read the alphabetic summary at the end and save yourself your valuable time.

What separates There is no Planet B from other climate change books is the way Mike Berners-Lee looks at the numbers. Instead of boring readers with billions of tons of various nefarious elements, chemicals, and compounds, he has transformed them into calories, something most can grasp.

The world produces 5940 calories in plant based food - per day per person. Humans need to consume 2300. So there’s lots to go round. But. 1740 go to livestock, plus another 3810 they pick up in non-crops like grass and pasture. But livestock only provide 590 calories to humans per day. It becomes evident that livestock is not a great way to use declining land resources.

People consume 44 calories of protein per person per day, but livestock consumes 89. Animals destroy protein. Then, 1320 calories per person per day simply go to waste, in processing, transport and trash. Cutting waste by half would increase global food supply by 20%.

Using this kind of thinking, Berners-Lee examines the usual suspects: food, transport, heating, etc. The conclusion is unchanged. At current rates of increase, Man will be consuming seven times as much energy by the end of the century. This despite electric cars, solar and wind.

Things like carbon taxes can raise trillions annually to help clean up the air, soil and water. But to do that, Berners-Lee wants to charge hundreds of dollars per ton of pollution. The current rate is about 35. It will mean several extra dollars per gallon of gas. This will not result in the desired reduction in driving so much as rioting, as we have seen with Gilets Jaunes in France. Their carbon tax amounted to about fifty cents per gallon.

The Paris Accord whereby all countries work to reduce emissions and consumption, has of course resulted in this continuing increase in both instead. Holding global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius becomes laughable in that context.

He looks at those countries’ attitudes differently as well. He maintains everyone- every individual - must be active participants, but that inequality around the world will cause resentment among the poorer nations, including of all countries, the United States. He shows that the median American is worse off than Italians, Germans, Spaniards, Brits, French, Norwegians and Icelanders. While the average wealth of Americans is much higher than the rest, average means spreading the huge wealth of the top one percent over the whole population. But of course they have no access to that wealth.

When he looks at actual wealth per person using mean instead of average, the chart goes upside down. Italians are twice as well off as Americans at the median, the very center of the range. But neither seems to know that. This will help prevent forward movement in remediating climate change. Inequality has distorted the American Dream to genuine poverty. To top it off, he says “Trickledown, to be blunt, is a neoliberal self-deception at best, and at worst a lie.”

So much for thought-provoking analysis. The bulk of the book is instruction on how to live. Berners-Lee continually repeats his mantra of living mindfully, not wasting, not driving, not flying, not working for any firm that isn’t climate conscious, and demanding that any politician worth a vote can talk intelligently on Berners-Lee’s 14 point program of considerations. Personally, I can’t name a single politician in the United States who can or will do that. Never mind actually agreeing with them. In order for Man to make any dent at all, absolutely everyone in the world has to be onboard with this 14 point plan. Or we need a Planet B.

Berners-Lee is nothing if not optimistic. Despite all the figures he provides, he still sees the cup half full. All he asks is that everyone agree with him, and act like they do. After all, he does.

In some ways, Berners-Lee is already living on Planet B. He says “In the twenty-first century, it is totally unhelpful to have organisations that exist primarily to make profit …. The profit motive has to be yesterday’s thinking.” This is not going to go very far on Planet A.

There is no Planet B is disappointingly naïve, and unsatisfactorily and unjustifiably positive. This is not the way it is going to be, and pretending so is not helpful.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee is a critical look at the demands on the environment made by man and humanity's growing energy demands. Berners-Lee is a leading expert in carbon footprinting. He is the director, and principal consultant at Small World Consulting and author of How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.

Berners-Lee gives a very accurate look at the demands humanity puts on the environment and clears up several myths and misrepresentations that are now commonplace. We have all heard about deforestation for the expansion of soybeans. What we are not informed about is that the soybeans that are grown are not for human consumption but to feed livestock. Livestock are poor converters of plant protein to animal protein. Give up meat completely? No there is no need grass-fed, and free range can use land that is unproductive for farming. Alternative energy sources such as solar can easily meet our current energy demands, but our increased demand for energy will require every square mile of land to meet our requirements by 2100. Of course, efficiency and technology will improve over time, but efficiency seems to create even higher demand. People get the idea that increased efficiency means you can use it more. If my new car gets 35mpg and my old car only got 17 mpg I can use it twice as much or buy another vehicle.

Berners-Lee finds the loopholes that many people miss when talking about food production or energy use. Is nuclear power too dirty to use? Is my electric car really a coal-burning vehicle (coal is used to produce electricity that powers the vehicle)? And is it worse than an oil-powered vehicle? Is fracking safe? Is wealth disparages hurting things overall? There is No Planet B offers a thought proking and sometimes scary outlook for the future. It is not a smooth read all the way through and can easily be read by topic and skipped through. The subject matter is compartmentalized and can be easily jumped through to the issues of interest. There Is No Planet B is a well-done and realistic critique of man versus the planet.

Available March 4, 2019