How to Live the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle

Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle reveals the carbon cost of everything we do, hand shows how to reduce your carbon footprint by over 80% to 2.5 tons a person per year, by 2030.

Find the big wins to what to drop – from takeout food to bikes, cars and Internet usage. Learn the invisible carbon baked into everything, and why electric cars are not the answer.

If growing green spaces, read up on pet-friendly gardens and wildlife-friendly gardens. Also read how to stop birds flying into windows. And trees to avoid near horses (yew, oak, sycamore).

I used to have a monster carbon footprint. I was in my second career (my first was an architect) as a real estate developer in Toronto, building award-winning condos. I drove my classic Porsche a couple of blocks to work, I drove my daughters to school.

Then at weekends, we drove to the ski resort where all the rich developers hung out. Every weekend in summer, I drove up to our cottage. Throw in a few flights a year, and I was living a 30-tonne lifestyle. Then after a falling out with business partners, I had a massive financial loss and probably a nervous breakdown.

This book shows that creating carbon minimalism is the answer. Big-picture thinking is needed like investing and supporting local indie shops (that sell food with zero food miles so no lorries are needed to transport it from central distribution houses).

Creating walkable communities with parks (trees!) and initiatives to work from home or locally, so people don’t chop down whole swathes of countryside to build ‘high speed trains’ that nobody needs.

It’s about retaining countryside so people can walk to the shops to buy healthy food, then this means populations that don’t languish in hospitals and care homes, all of which also emit huge fossil fuels to keep them running.

Lloyd Alter is a writer, public speaker, architect and inventor. He is also Adjunct Professor of Sustainable Design at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Also read his other book The Story of Upfront Carbon, about how the answer to solving climate change is for all us to ‘live with just enough’.