Mike Berners-Lee Books

To understand what a carbon footprint really means, we begin with the basic building blocks of measurement. A carbon footprint represents the total greenhouse gases emitted because of an activity, product, or process, converted into carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e). This standardization allows us t...

From How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything

The journey into everyday activities often reveals the most startling lessons. Take boiling water or sending emails—mundane actions that turn out to carry measurable footprints. Boiling a kettle to make a cup of tea uses energy, of course, but most of the time we boil more water than we need. The ex...

From How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything

At the core of our argument lies a scientific principle as precise as it is unforgiving: the carbon budget. Climate science shows that to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels—a threshold chosen to avoid runaway climatic change—humanity can emit only a fixed amount of carbon dioxid...

From The Burning Question: We Can't Burn Half the World's Oil, Coal and Gas. So How Do We Quit?

When we examined the data on global fossil reserves, the picture was clear. The proven reserves of coal, oil, and gas—those already located and catalogued—contain roughly five times more carbon than can safely be emitted within the 2°C budget. That means over 80 percent must remain in the ground. T...

From The Burning Question: We Can't Burn Half the World's Oil, Coal and Gas. So How Do We Quit?