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George Monbiot

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George Monbiot is "Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. Monbiot is author of Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He is active in the ecology movement and helped to found the land rights campaign 'The Land is Ours'. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper and is a ZNet Commentator. [1]

Writing for Monthly Review Zine in 2008, Patrick Bond observed that: "Perhaps the most eloquent climate analyst in the North is George Monbiot..." [1] By way of a contrast, Monthly Review editor, John Bellamy Foster, wrote the year before that in his new book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning Monbiot had "gotten into the act" of proposing solutions "shaped by the fact that they are designed to fit within the capitalist box." Foster continues: "Politics is carefully excluded from his analysis, which instead focuses on such things as more buses, better insulated homes, virtual work, virtual shopping and improved cement. Corporations, we are led to believe, are part of the solution, not part of the problem." [2]

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A champion of not owning cars, Monbiot actually owns a car. He once described the pro-car lobby as “antisocial bastards” [2] and has blamed cars for ruining children’s lives. “Our children are growing upsocially stunted: instead of playing together they are playing alone on their computers, in part because the only available public spaces have gone.” [3]

Monbiot drives a Renault Clio, not the most frugal in fuel consumption or carbon emissions.[citation needed] He bought it from a friend for an undisclosed amount. It emits 115g/km , 10% higher than a Toyota Prius, the petrol-electric hybrid beloved of the green movement. "I’ve had to break a long-time commitment," he explained, "but the only way to get by, we decided, was to have the occasional use of a car.” [4]

In his latest book, 'Heat', Monbiot worked out that the coach was the greenest form of travel, in terms of CO2 emissions per person per kilometre. But does Monbiot use it? No. “Coach travel would be slightly better [than the train] but I will be damned if I’m going round the country in the current system,” he says. “If you’ve got loads of time and very little money -- if you’re unemployed, say -- the coach is the way to go. But if you need to get anywhere that day, it’s unusable."

Monbiot admits to being “a terrible boy racer” in his youth, tearing up country roads in his first car, a Renault 8. “I should have been banned,” he says. “I didn’t have enough sense at the wheel.” Now Monbiot has begun campaigning to have speed cameras installed in Machynlleth in west Wales where he lives, citing “problems with boy racers”. [5]

Monbiot has stated that air travel is unacceptable. "Global warming means that flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse," he wrote in a 1999 article. [6] Yet he himself traveled an undisclosed amount of transatlantic air miles to promote his book "Heat - How to stop the planet burning," a book which highlights the unacceptability of transatlantic travel. Monbiot also believes that self-enforced abstinence is a waste of time: “Why bother installing an energy-efficient lightbulb when a man in Lanarkshire boasts of attaching 1.2 million Christmas lights to his house?” [7]

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References

  1. ↑ From False to Real Solutions for Climate Change, MRZine, accessed October 27, 2009.
  2. ↑ A New War on the Planet?, MRZine, accessed October 27, 2009.
  3. ↑ National Council, Internet Archive (2006), accessed June 26, 2008.
  4. ↑ Journalist Advisory Committee, The Real News, accessed March 17, 2008.

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