The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming Myths that Hinder Progress

Sometimes solving climate change seems impossibly complex, and it is hard to know what changes we all can and should make to help. This book offers hope. Drawing on the latest research, Mark Jaccard shows us how to recognize the absolutely essential actions (decarbonizing electricity and transport) and policies (regulations that phase out coal plants and gasoline vehicles, carbon tariffs). Rather than feeling paralyzed and pursuing ineffective efforts, we can all make a few key changes in our lifestyles to reduce emissions, to contribute to the urgently needed affordable energy transition in developed and developing countries. More importantly, Jaccard shows how to distinguish climate-sincere from insincere politicians and increase the chance of electing and sustaining these leaders in power. In combining the personal and the political, The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success offers a clear and simple strategic path to solving the greatest problem of our times. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A professor of sustainable energy at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Jaccard has a Ph.D. in economics from Université de Grenoble. He has helped many governments with climate-energy policy, including serving on the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the 1990s, he chaired British Columbia's utilities commission and in the 2000s he helped design its famous carbon tax, clean electricity standard and other climate-energy policies. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada in recognition of his research, and a frequent media presence in Canada and the US. His book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels (Cambridge, 2005), won the Donner Prize. His efforts on the climate challenge range from testifying before the US Congress and the European Commission to being arrested for blocking a coal train, as he explains in this book.