Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change

Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation 2021

What can we really do about the climate emergency?

The inconvenient truth is that we are causing the climate crisis with our carbon intensive lifestyles and that fixing - or even just slowing - it will affect all of us. But it can be done.

In Net Zero, economist Dieter Helm addresses the action we all need to take to tackle the climate emergency: personal, local, national and global. Reducing our own carbon consumption is the first step. Helm argues that we, the ultimate polluters, should pay based on how much carbon the products we buy produce. We need a carbon price, and one that applies to everything and everywhere, from flights, to food and farming.

The goal of net zero carbon emissions needs a rethink and this book sets out how to do it in a plan that could and would work. Do this and we make no further contribution to global warming, in a way that embraces sustainable economic growth and does not harm other aspects of the environment in the process. There is a solution and we must find it. Everything is at stake.