There Is No Planet B by Mike Berners-Lee

In There Is No Planet B, Mike Berners-Lee uses chapters organized by theme and structured as sets of questions and answers (with some graphs and charts to accompany them) to explore issues related to climate change and the question of how humanity can survive/thrive/take care of our planet in our current era and beyond. The first chapter, on food, was especially interesting: I think I’d known but had forgotten how big the environmental impact of beef is compared to chicken or to vegetarian protein sources, and it was good to be reminded of that. I learned that agriculture is estimated to cause 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and that 20% of food waste is caused by consumers, and that feeding animals on food (like soybeans) that could be eaten by people is a big problem because it’s hugely inefficient. In this chapter, and elsewhere in the book, Berners-Lee reminds readers that “everything we spend money on is an investment into one type of future or another,” so we should all be conscious of where our money is going and what kind of future we’re shaping (48).

Striking facts and figures I learned elsewhere in the book: humanity has produced 9 billion metric tons of plastic, 5.4 billion metric tons of which “has been chucked into landfill or scattered onto land and sea” (55). Also, “over a third of all our plastic is used for disposable packaging” (58).

On the subject of energy, Berners-Lee is optimistic about solar energy, but only if “we can succeed in deliberately limiting our energy growth,” which we haven’t managed to do thus far (68). Meanwhile, we need to cut fossil fuel use in a hurry, but the only way to do this is to have “an enforceable global deal to leave the fuel in the ground,” which we also haven’t managed yet (88). That need for global cooperation is a factor in the chapters on “growth, money and metrics” (if we’re just measuring things like GDP, we may be measuring/incentivizing the wrong things) and “thinking skills for today’s world” (in which Berners-Lee points out that we need to be cultivating and emphasizing things like “global empathy” if we’re going to get anywhere).

This was a quite different book from my usual diet of novels/kids’ books/narrative nonfiction, but I’m glad I picked it up. (Disclaimer: this book is published by my employer, and I decided to read it after a talk that Berners-Lee gave to staff members, but I got it from the library like anyone else, and kept reading because I was interested.) The Q&A format keeps it from being too dense, and it was interesting to read an evidence-heavy book on this topic.


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