How Bad Are Bananas?

This book is likely to become a key text in my attempt to reduce my own carbon footprint.

Berners-Lee covers over 100 items, and looks at their carbon footprint. Giving both his estimates and the reasoning behind those estimates. In reading the book, you start to get a sense of how to go about making these estimates yourself.

There are three key strengths to the book and one weakness. Proportionality, honesty about trade-offs and providing data are the strengths and the weakness is not enough balance between the personal and the systemic.

I’ll start with the weakness: this book assumes that you are interested in reducing your personal carbon emissions. While there are entries, such as a “human being” and “war”, that hint at some of the systemic issues around climate change. However, there are very few political actions recommended in this book, though some are recommended such as the UK government supporting the Amazon Fund rather than providing discounts and incentives for solar panels. This book also doesn’t provide direct guidance on which companies might be worth boycotting to change their behaviour around climate change. This can, however, be inferred. I don’t personally feel this book is placing the blame on me (rather than on government inaction or deliberate deception by large corporations). My feeling is that taking responsibility for my own actions is the first step in a journey that also involves demanding that same responsibility from governments and companies.

With that out of the way, I’ll describe what I see as the strengths of the book.

I’ve described the first as proportionality. I could also describe this as getting the most bang for you buck (or perhaps the least bang since the goal is to reduce your carbon footprint). This is a key point that Berners-Lee returns to again and again. One example is worrying about whether or not to use a hand dryer in public restrooms (low impact) versus flying on dozens of trans-Atlantic flights a year (high impact). Another is the Amazon Fund vs solar panels investment mentioned above.

The second strength of this book is a refreshing clarity around trade-offs. Although this is a book about carbon footprints, Berners-Lee is always clear when a decision to improve the climate footprint of some activity will have other impacts. Examples here are increasing intensive animal farming to try to reduce the carbon impact of meat or cheese. Another is the relatively low impact of plastic (when compared to paper products) compared to plastic’s tendency to stick around and impact ecosystems.

The third key strength of this book is that Berners-Lee provides pointers to the data he uses. This is very useful if you’re interested in digging in and understanding how to reduce your own carbon footprint (or even understand which policies would be best for governments to implement or which companies have the greatest impact on the environment.

If you’re interested in reducing you carbon footprint, I strongly recommend this book. It delves into the complexities of understanding your footprint and provides some ways of thinking about this complexity that helps to make it much less complicated. If you’re not interested in your own carbon footprint or see this as a way of shifting blame from governments and companies to individuals (an entirely valid point t of view), this may not be the book for you. I would argue though that some of the approaches Berners-Lee takes here would be useful in deciding what to focus on when campaigning for change at the governmental or corporate level.