"The Climate Diet: How You Can Cut Carbon, Cut Costs and Save the Planet" by Jonathan Harrington

The Climate Diet offers an optimistic, easy to understand and engaging message. It has never been easier for families to cut back on their use of fossil fuels and protect the climate all while saving money. By using the familiar language of weight loss, The Climate Diet explains climate change concepts, problems and solutions in ways that anyone can easily understand. Following a five-step climate diet plan, families will be able to count their carbon calories, learn how to reduce them and aim for one of four different levels of achievement: Participant, Bronze, Silver and Gold, each of which can be tailored to fit almost any lifestyle.

This is the must-have guide to the most important diet ever. If we all participate, the greenhouse gas emissions bulge can be beaten, leaving us with a slim healthy planet now and for the future.

We live in a world of excess. We consume too much of everything—food, clothes, cars, bricks and mortar. Our bingeing is often so extreme that it threatens our own health and well being. And we are not the only ones who are getting sick.

The Earth—which provides the food, air, water and land that sustains us—is also under severe pressure. Gluttonous consumption of nature's trans-fats—carbon-based fossil fuels, deforestation and unsustainable resource use—is disrupting the global temperature-regulating machine that mother nature has carefully maintained for millions of years. Try as she may to keep from running a fever, the environmental reengineering wrought by six billion people, like a force of nature, is warming our world. At some point, something just has to give. We either take steps to put our personal lifestyles and planetary systems back into balance or we suffer the consequences.

So, what does any unhealthy overweight person do when the doctor tells him or her that they are eating hemselves into an early grave? Go on a diet!

Contents
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter One. Cool Strategies for a Warming World
Chapter Two. Ten Good Reasons to Go On a Climate Diet
Chapter Three. Going for the Gold: The Nuts and Volts of Climate Diet Success
Chapter Four. Less Is More: Creating a Climate Diet Home
Chapter Five. Finding the Right Balance: Heating, Cooling, and Outside Spaces
Chapter Six. Shopping, Eating, Recycling, and More
Chapter Seven. Hit the Road the Climatewise Way
Chapter Eight. Community Strategies for a Better Climate
Chapter Nine. Putting It All Together: Your Climate Diet Results
Chapter Ten. Epilogue: Our Lifestyle—Her Life
Appendices
Appendix A More on the Science of Climate Change
Appendix B Sample Climate Diet Worksheet
Appendix C International Energy and Price Data for Selected Countries (2007)
Appendix D Energy and Emissions Data by State/Province (USA, Canada, and Australia, 2005)
Appendix E Detailed Energy-Use Characteristics by Product/Item
Appendix F CO2e Emissions Associated with Farming and Animal Husbandry
References
About the Author
Index