Separating climate fact from factoid

Only colossal changes in the energy industry will stop global warming. But first people need to get their facts straight, says David MacKay. Interview by Derek Brower

IF YOU leave your DVD player on stand-by all day instead of shutting it off then you're consuming the same amount of energy that it takes to ship the entire thing by plane from China, where it was made. If you read that and didn't blink, then you've probably been infected by a global-warming disease, one that leaves you unable to tell fact from factoid, truth from hogwash. If you're reading this on the first leg of a return flight across the Atlantic, then by the time you get home again you'll have pumped into the atmosphere more than a third of the carbon each human emits, on average, every year. That one's true. The global annual per capita carbon footprint is about five tonnes of CO2, and