Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era
Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era – Review
A friend of mine who is a political scientist discovered me to widely read Jeremy Leggett’s The Carbon War. He reportedly said it was the greatest book he’d still seen on the policy of international climate change. After simply reading it, I have to agree. Leggett previously taught oil geology at Britain’s Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine before transferring his allegiance to Greenpeace, where he directed their Climate Campaign and later their Solar Initiative. In The Carbon War he provides an insider’s picture of the decade of battles starting up to the Kyoto treaty. Through his eyes we make to see the intense machinations of the large oil companies and their allies as they fight to block the global movement to develop a fixing climate agreement. Leggett pulls no punches. He provides names, dates and details of the non-stop lobbying, shameless “scientific” distortions, and well-financed public relations campaigns by what he and other environmentalists dubbed “The Carbon Club.” He describes in depth the behind-the-scenes collusion, pressure tactics and smears that stymied progress on the climate despite a decade of climate-related catastrophes and rapidly increasing logical certainty about global warming and its ramifications. He also reports on the counter-punches Greenpeace and other ecological groups survived to land–for example immediately alerting the hemorrhaging insurance industry that their tragic losses were not accidental and were required to get worse unless greenhouse emissions are greatly reduced. The book ends in 2000, but all the forces Leggett reveals remain in play today. The World Summit in Johannesburg this September was torn by the same battles and struggled to reach the same form of will-of-the-wisp agreements as Kyoto. For anyone who believes, as Leggett clearly does, that we must reduce our destabilizing assault on the atmosphere in order to maintain a stable and livable climate, this book is a must. It dives deep beneath the headlines to finally let you know how critical decisions concerning development, the exploitation of resources, and our widely shared future, are actually being usually made. As Leggett says, “The race against time is on, and we should have originally started running by now; racing to crank up the solar revolution, racing to rapidly mobilizing the capital markets as engines for survival instead of suicide.” Robert Adler, creator of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley, 2002).