A Simple Guide To Building An Economy That Won't Destroy The Planet

You recycle your plastic iced tea bottles. Of course you carry a reusable bottle for water. You compost the scraps from your locally sourced, organically grown vegetables. You hardly ever eat red meat. You carpool to work in your electric car. You bike on the weekends.

But you're still doing almost nothing to stop carbon emissions from warming the planet and disastrously altering the climate. 

Being a low-carbon consumer is great, but we need a low-carbon economy. To achieve this, we'll need to rewire businesses, cities, economics, finance and technology to function on renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and water. It may seem like an overwhelming task, but it has to happen.

Paying homage to the sort of easy-to-follow instructions popularized by Ikea—which has pledged to use only renewable energy by 2020—we've crafted a simple how-to kit for transitioning to a low-carbon economy.