Review: The Carbon Diaries

The Carbon Diaries 2015. Saci Lloyd. Preparation for the next apocalypse

At a bioethanol seminar I attended in Sweden last year, one of the key people in the research for renewable energy did a lookback/look forward presentation on where we are with fossil fuels. He offered a scenario that in practical terms the time will come when we all get an annual ration of oil per person that wouldn't even drive us to Dublin and back.

An apocalyptic vision? Yep, and it didn't take in a lot of probable answers to the whole energy equation that necessity will jump start. His idea was, though, to make us think.

Well, a book newly available in Kilcullen Library does the same thing, cued in to the whole climate change issue. It is set in Britain in 2015, the first nation to impose 'carbon rationing' in a bid to cut down on the country's carbon footprint. A massive storm the year before had triggered the move.

It's humorous, in a very black way. It takes the Brown family and their friends and reports on their journey through the first year of rationing, when everything they do revolves around the allocation of 200 'Carbon Credits' per month per family member. We follow their progress through the eyes of Laura, one of the daughters. She's a bit of an anarchist, but the only one with some sense.

One entry in her diary sets the scene succinctly.

'Carbon card arrived today. It's got these little blocks down one side going from green to red and as you use up your year's ration they fade away till you're down to the last red and then you're all alone, sobbing in the dark...'

The diary records a year of trauma, of occasional hilarity, and of a resurgence of the 'Blitz' mentality. There's even the 21st century electronic version of the 'Glimmer Man', a smart meter that starts to control various appliances if the family exceeds its monthly quota. There are 'Offender' rehabilitation programmes, too, for such families and uncompliant members within them. A kind of a CO Big Brother looms behind everything. And there's much more gloom, as we read of vicious winters and roasting summers causing all sorts of daily difficulties for the Browns and their neighbours and the country.

This book is bloody depressing in its theme. But it is also brilliantly written in a naive style which is strangely elegant, ironically comical, and sketches deftly the human sides, both good and bad, of a nation dealing with the next apocalypse.

A primer for the coming decades? Maybe, if you're a pessimist, and if you believe the current global business meltdown is only the start of the end. I still wear the other hat, the optimistic one. I made one mistake, though. I went through this book quickly, to avoid becoming depressed. But without a bottle of full-bodied red to hand. Trust me, it's necessary.

Brian Byrne.