Book Review: Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle by Lloyd Alter

How do we actually live a lifestyle that fits within the limit of 1.5 degree Celsius warming? This author finds out.

What a week, friends! If you are Christian clergy, you know…I’m getting this off to you in between preparing worship services for Christmas. And preparing Christmas gifts and baking. And…

This is a previously published blog post from my website.

Lloyd Alter

is now on Substack.

Lloyd Alter

, perhaps you could share this and add the details of your upcoming book. I look forward to reading it, too!

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Book Review: Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle by Lloyd Alter

In the climate emergency, we are being called to limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2030 and to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. We cannot stop the rise in global temperatures anymore; our best efforts now are to try to mitigate the rise. On our current trajectory, we are headed for catastrophe with more than 3°C warming.

Who Needs to Change?

When I say “we,” I mean the entire human population, as well as the whole Earth community, which is being irreversibly impacted by climate change. However, ‘we’ are not equally impacted by global warming; the vast majority of climate change’s disastrous effects are being felt by the poor, especially in the global South. Yet the cause of global warming, rampant greenhouse gas emissions caused by insatiable consumerism, is at the hands of the middle and upper classes of people, especially in the global North.  

Since I am part of the global North that is responsible for the problem, I am interested in what I can do, as an individual, to work toward the global goal of only 1.5°C warming by 2030. Thus, I was drawn to the book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle: Why Individual Climate Action Matters More than Ever by Lloyd Alter.

About the Author

Alter is a Toronto-based writer, speaker and sustainable design instructor. He is also the curator of Treehugger.com, a source for articles on ecological sustainability. To this work, Alter brings his background as an architect, builder and developer. The fact that Alter is based in Ontario was a big draw for me because I am looking for concrete information on how I, as an urban-based Canadian, living in the Ontario climate, can make sustainable ecological changes.

The 1.5-Degree Lifestyle

What does the 1.5-degree lifestyle mean in the title of the book? Referring to the 1.5°C warming that is the best that we can achieve in the next decade if we radically change production and consumption to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, [1] the premise of Alter’s book is that “we are all collectively responsible for reducing our carbon emissions to keep under that 1.5-degree ceiling”.[2]

Learning From the Pandemic

While we know that governments and big business must take lead roles in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and bringing in clean technologies, there is a big role for individuals to play, as well. Alter’s book argues that we must not only look at the production side of things, the emissions released when goods and services are created, but especially the consumption of those goods and services. He points out that in the Covid-19 pandemic when businesses were forced to close and people stayed at home, global emissions dropped by 7%. If you ever thought that your individual actions don’t make a difference in the face of the climate crisis, this is evidence that they do.

The shutdown of the pandemic was not predicted, and it wasn’t within our control, and there were other negative implications of the shutdown that neither Alter nor myself are trying to minimize. Nevertheless, it demonstrates clear evidence of the power that individuals have in the face of the climate crisis to make real changes in our individual patterns of eating, living, getting around, and shopping, in order to help the world move to a cap on warming to only 1.5°C by the end of this decade.

More Than a Guidebook

When I first read the title of this book, I assumed that it was going to be a fairly straightforward guidebook to help me make changes in my individual behaviour, a kind of self-help “10 easy steps you can take now!” type of book.

In that, I was mistaken. It is much more than a guidebook…

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