The Carbon Crunch How We're Getting Climate Change Wrong - and How to Fix it Dieter Helm

Despite commitments to renewable energy and two decades of international negotiations, global emissions continue to rise. Coal, the most damaging of all fossil fuels, has actually risen from 25 per cent to almost 30 per cent of world energy use. And while European countries have congratulated themselves on reducing emissions, they have increased their carbon imports from China and other developing nations, who continue to expand their coal use. As standards of living increase in developing countries, coal use can only increase as well - and global temperatures along with it. In this hard-hitting book, Dieter Helm looks at how and why we have failed to tackle the issue of global warming and argues for a new, pragmatic rethinking of energy policy - from transitioning from coal to gas and eventually to electrification of transport, to carbon pricing and a focus on new technologies. Lucid, compelling and rigorously researched, this book will have a lasting impact on how we think about climate change.

Dieter Helm CBE is professor of energy policy, University of Oxford and Fellow in Economics at New College, Oxford. He is a member of the Economic Advisory Committee to the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and Chair of the Natural Capital Committee.

'Mr Helm has done a service to everyone else by describing what a global climate-change mitigation regime would look like if one took economics seriously.' 
- The Economist

'[The Carbon Crunch] is a provocative analysis and well worth the discomfort it will likely engender.'
- Steve Yearley, Times Higher Education

'[Dieter Helm] has turned his agile mind to one of the great problems of our age: why the world's efforts to curb the carbon dioxide emissions behind global warming have gone so wrong, and how it can do better. He is far from being the first to tackle the issue, but he is among the more influential and, as he demonstrated in his new book, The Carbon Crunch, one of the more readable.'
- Pilita Clark, Financial Times

'The Carbon Crunch is a powerful and heartfelt plea for hard-nosed realism. And it also suggests a worrying truth – that the environmental movement is often more interested in pursuing a soft-focus vision of a greener world than in actually fixing climate change.'
- Fred Pearce, New Scientist