Leggett,J. (1999) The Carbon War: Dispatches from the End of the Oil Century. London: Penguin Books. 337pp.

This essay continues my series of monthly posts in which I select one ‘climate’ book to highlight and review from one of the 44 years of my professional career in climate research (starting with 1984, my first year of academic employment).  The series will end in September 2027, the month in which I shall retire.  See here for more information about the rational for this series, and the criteria I have used in selecting my highlighted books.

This ‘1999 essay’ can be download as a pdf.

In February this year, the multinational oil and gas company, BP, announced a major shift in strategy.  Its previously planned funding for renewable energy developments was to be cut—by more than $5bn— and investments in oil and gas would increase by about 20 per cent to $10bn.  BP’s chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, believed that the company had moved “too far, too fast” in transitioning away from fossil fuels, and that the company’s faith in green energy was “misplaced”.  This was announced as part of a strategy “reset” to allow the company to secure returns for its shareholders.[1]

The wheel turns.  More than a quarter of century earlier, in May 1997, the then BP chief executive, John Browne, had also set the news wires buzzing with an announcement that BP was repositioning itself to become the most environmentally aware and forward-looking oil and gas company.  “It would be unwise and potentially dangerous to ignore the mounting concern about climate change”, said Browne, speaking to an audience at Stanford University.  A year earlier, in 1996, BP had left the Global Climate Coalition—an international lobby group of businesses that between 1989 and 2001 opposed action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—and now BP was to join the Greenhouse Gas Programme of the International Energy Agency to accelerate the development of technologies for reducing and offsetting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.  Over time, Browne told his Stanford audience, BP would move towards “the elimination of emissions from our own operations and a substantial reduction in the emissions which come from the use of our products.”[2]  Three years later, BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum”.

Browne’s Stanford speech is captured in Jeremy Leggett’s book ‘The Carbon War: Dispatches from the End of the Oil Century’, which I have selected as my 1999 Climate Book of the Year.  ‘The Carbon War’ is a diarised account of Leggett’s eight-year role, as Greenpeace International’s Director of Science, to bring NGO pressure to bear on the international negotiations for developing an international climate treaty, eventually arrived at in 1997 as the Kyoto Protocol.  In the book, Leggett records his emotions after reading Browne’s Stanford speech. “I was elated”, he wrote.  “I knew at once that this would send a signal into the markets that would make my work of trying to persuade investors to back solar [energy] much less difficult”.  This change of heart “by such a large industry player”, he continued, “would clearly stand a chance of boosting the will of governments to act at [the] Kyoto [conference]” [p.263]. 

Jeremy Leggett (b.1954) is a self-designated social entrepreneur and writer, now heavily invested in Highlands Rewilding. This is an estate-based project on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland committed to generating sustainable and ethical profits by demonstrating a new way of land management, one that is “better for people, nature and the planet”.  But Leggett has three previous careers behind him.  Initially, between 1978 and 1989, he was an earth scientist researcher and teacher in the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College London and then, between 1989 and 1996, as science advisor and then director for Greenpeace International.  He left Greenpeace at the end of 1996 to set up his own solar photovoltaic (PV) company, Solar Century, for which he remained a board member until 2020. 

Leggett’s career trajectory is important for understanding the motivation and significance of ‘The Carbon War’.  He writes in the Preface that, “one day early in 1989, I stood in front of a class of 40 undergraduates giving a lecture on an oilfield in California”, when he suddenly realised that “I could not go on” [p.ix].  The tension between his job with Imperial College and his growing environmental concerns was too great.  Later that year, he applied for the job of scientific advisor to Greenpeace International.  He had moved, he wrote, “from one of the most conservative universities in the world to one of the most radical environmental groups” [p.xi].

‘The Carbon War’, then, is Leggett’s first-hand account of his role with Greenpeace during the 1990s.  Written in the style of a personal diary, the narrative moves from October 1989 in Berlin—just before the Wall came down—en route to the Greenpeace office in Moscow; to November 1998 in the United States as he was trying to persuade a group of Swiss bankers to set up the world’s first PV-investment fund.  During these ten years, climate change became institutionalised in international politics through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1990), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), and the Kyoto Protocol (1997).  Leggett was present at the birth of all three of these strategic developments.

‘The Carbon War’ needs to be read as diary, not as history—there are many later books which reflect more systematically and analytically on the history of climate politics of this decade.[3]  What Leggett offers here is a compelling, and somewhat breathless, first-hand account of his involvement and interactions with many of the international gatherings, networks and individuals that were prominent during these years.  Leggett seems to have attended most of the important international climate science and diplomatic meetings of the 1990s decade—for example, the ratification of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in the UK (1990), and of its Second Report in Madrid (1995); the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva (1990); the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (1992); the first meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Climate Convention in Berlin (1995), the second COP meeting in Geneva (1996), the Oxford Solar Investment Summit (1996)—which he initiated, COP3 in Kyoto (1997), and many more.

The book is organised around Leggett’s presence at this multitude of meetings and encounters, 72 separate diarised sections (the ‘dispatches’ of his title) over the nine year period, and representing, by my count, visits to at least 27 different countries.  This non-stop carousel of globe-spanning air travel epitomised the new internationalism of the 1990s, which in turn shaped the new science and politics of climate change.  It therefore seems a bit rich for Leggett to sneer at the climate sceptic Richard Lindzen for accepting “all-expenses-paid trips to fly around the world and speak wherever the carbon club thinks he needs to be listened to” [p.41].  Legget was doing just the same, but for Greenpeace.

The other framing device in the book is Leggett’s notion of ‘the carbon club’, by which he means primarily the Global Climate Coalition and its pro-fossil fuel associates—in the automobile and manufacturing industries and in oil-rich nations.  He uses the carbon club as a shorthand to describe his perceived enemies in the carbon war; hence his concluding accusation of “the carbon club’s crimes against humanity” [p.328].  For Leggett, the ‘war’ referred to in the title is the ongoing battle he and others fought against “the foot-soldiers” of the carbon club in order to challenge their influence on the emerging international politics of climate change.  The prompted the book’s reviewer in The Economist to note,

Despite its conspiratorial approach, this book has two strengths.  First, it provides ample evidence … to support its assertions.  Mr Leggett knows both sides of the street: a geologist by training, he made a fortune as a consultant to the oil industry before he got green religion.  Second, besides being a fiery prosecutor, Mr Leggett can also be a thoughtful and agreeable companion.  Much of the book is written in the style of a personal log.  That leads to a look into the author’s own psyche and revealing glimpses of his lifestyle as a globe-trotting do-gooder.[4]

By exposing the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists, ‘The Carbon War’ aimed to achieve internationally what Ross Gelbspan had sought to do for the United States in his 1997 book, ‘The Heat Is On’ (see my earlier review).  Reviewing ‘The Carbon War’ for New Scientist magazine, Michael Jefferson—Deputy Secretary-General of the World Energy Council and a former Chief Economist of the Royal Dutch Shell Group—wrote that “Leggett’s racy account [is] of a key time for the environmental movement, when the battle between big-time, carbon-belching corporations and adamant greens was at its hottest.”[5]

Leggett engages his enemy by confronting some of their claims directly—as for example in a debate with Lindzen at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London in 1991—or by accusing government diplomats of selling-out to the oil barons.  Leggett also develops a more subversive strategy which is threaded throughout his dispatches.  This is his persistent lobbying of insurance companies and other firms in the financial sector to convince them, out of self-interest, to advance a more proactive voice favouring restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and to switch their investment portfolios towards renewables, and towards solar PV in particular. 

In a detailed review of the book for the journal Climatic Change, veteran climate advocate Michael Oppenheimer praised this “prosyletising” as a “brilliant strategic move”, suggesting that, even though Leggett eventually realised the strategy’s limits, he had “created early momentum for the more general industry move toward a more balanced view on climate”.[6]  And yet Oppenheimer was critical of the way Leggett “blurred the distinction” between, on the one hand, scientific evidence for a changing climate and, on the other, unsubstantiated rhetorical claims about how dire future climate change would be.  Leggett was neither the first nor the last to be guilty of such carelessness.

After leaving Greenpeace in 1997 to establish his solar PV company, Solar Century, Leggett continued to write about energy politics.[7]  And ‘The Carbon War’ was reprinted two years later, this time in the United States through Routledge’s New York office—and with a different sub-title, ‘Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era’.  This reprint book attracted another round of reviews: “Exciting, fiery, revealing.  Leggett provides ample evidence, much of it drawn from first-hand experience”, said The Economist; “Jeremy Leggett…is one of the half-dozen experts most responsible for putting the climate change issue on the international agenda”, noted Mark Hertsgaard in The Washington Post; “As compelling as a good thriller, the book deftly describes the machinations of what Leggett calls ‘the carbon club’ or “the foot soldiers for the fossil-fuel industries”, concluded Publishers Weekly. 

Leggett ended his original 1999 book with the optimistic claim that “there will be an inescapable take-off point for solar PV sometime soon … this, like the enormity of the global-warming threat itself, is no longer in doubt” [p.327], and, “The solar revolution is coming” [p.328].  This cheery optimism prompted the cynical observation in The Economist: “If there is a flaw in Mr Leggett’s book, it is his tendency to make monsters out of the oil men.  After all, if the oil companies are really as powerful and as awful as he implies, what reason is there to believe that things can change?”[8] 

So how well has Leggett’s optimism about the ending of the oil era worn over the subsequent 25 years?   I think one can say that he has been proved both right and wrong.

He was right in so far that the share of global energy derived from direct solar generation has increased from a tiny fraction of one per cent in 1999 to nearly 3 per cent in 2025 (or to around 9 per cent of the world’s electricity generation), something like a hundred-fold increase in percentage share.  As if to emphasise this upward trajectory, in 2018 Leggett revisited his ‘carbon war’, this time in a book titled ‘Winning the Carbon War’.[9]  Yet he has also been proved wrong in thinking that his “solar revolution” would be able to turn the tide on carbon emissions.  Global carbon emissions have increased by 50 per cent in 25 years, and just over 80 per cent of the world’s total energy consumption still derives from fossil carbon sources, of which proportion oil contributes over one third.  We are a long way from ‘the end of the oil era’. 

Whether at root this is primarily because of the antics of the carbon club is questionable.  There are certainly other forces at work too.  Over the 25 years since ‘The Carbon War’ was published, the world’s population has increased by more than a third—from 6 billion to well over 8 billion, and still rising, probably to around 10 billion.  And during this time the world’s consumption of energy has doubled from 13 to 26 thousand TWh; a further 30 percent increase in energy demand by 2050 is likely. 

Whatever growing price competitiveness and penetration of solar PV technology Leggett foresaw at the end of the 1990s, and whatever has actually been achieved 25 years later, solar technologies have not been able to keep up with the world’s growing demand for energy.  Nor have they overcome the socio-technical, economic, and political inertia of fossil carbon energy infrastructure in meeting much of this demand.  Leggett’s ‘carbon war’ has not been won.  The ‘energy transition’—such as it will be—is still to come.

© Mike Hulme, May 2025

Another significant climate book published in 1999

Fagan,B. (1999) Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilisations. New York: Basic Books. 284pp.

There is a veritable list of past thinkers and writers who have explicated how climates influence societies, a tradition that can be traced back to Classical Greece, through writers of the French Enlightenment, and to Anglophone historians of the twentieth century such as Ellsworth Huntington, Ellen Semple and Hubert Lamb.  During the 1990s, with growing public interest in the real possibility that human activities could be responsible for altering contemporary climatic trends and patterns, new writers began to see opportunities for engaging wider audiences by updating and popularising some of this earlier thinking.  One such author was the British-born, but American-based, archaeologist Brian Fagan.  Picking up the huge worldwide interest triggered by the extremes and societal impacts of the 1997-98 El Niño—regarded then as the most severe such climatic event scientifically documented—Fagan published in 1999 the first of what would become a series of popular books in which he re-examined what was known about how climatic changes in the human past influenced not just local societies but entire civilisations.[10]

When he wrote Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilisations, Fagan was in his 60s and professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He had already published several books about the archaeology of Egyptian, Aztec and early American societies, but this was his first venture into specifically climatic history.  In ‘Floods, Famines and Emperors’, Fagan used climatological, historical and archaeological evidence to put together his tale about how El Niño’s had shaped human societies over the past two millennia.  He was agnostic about whether carbon dioxide-induced warming was changing, or would change, El Niño frequencies or severities—indeed, scientists today are still unsure.  But Fagan’s claims about civilisational vulnerability to climatic shocks offered a  softer version of Jared Dimond’s later environmental determinism, show-cased in his best-seller ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’ (Viking, 2005).

[1] Jack,S. and Masud,F. (2025) BP shuns renewables ni return to oil and gas.  BBC Business News. 26 February.  See also FT.  https://www.ft.com/content/4dcb19c9-4c98-4564-a65d-efed7ff26472

[2] Brown,J. (1997)  Speech to Standford University.  May 19.

[3] For example: Grubb,M., Vrolijk,C. and Brack,D. (1999) ‘The Kyoto Protocol: A Guide and Assessment.’ London: Royal Institute of International Affairs; Newell,P. (2000) ‘Climate for Change: Non-State Actors and the Global Politics of the Greenhouse.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Gupta,J. (2014) ‘The History of Global Climate Governance.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[4] ‘Oil and the environment’, Book review, The Economist, 11 November 1999.

[5] Jefferson,M. (1999) Book review in New Scientist, 3 October 1999.

[6] Oppenheimer,M. (2002) Book Review.  Jeremy Leggett: 2000, ‘The Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era’. Climatic Change. 54:497-505.

[7] Leggett,J. (2005) ‘Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis.’ Portobello Books; Leggett,J. (ed.) (2009) ‘Solar Century: The Past, Present and World-Changing Future of Solar Energy.’ Profile Books; Leggett,J. (2014) ‘The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance.’ Routledge.

[8] The Economist, op. cit.

[9] Leggett,J. (2018) ‘The Winning of the Carbon War: Power and Politics on the Front Lines of Climate and Clean Energy.’ Crux.

[10] These included the following: ‘The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850’ (Basic Books, 2000); ‘The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Granta, 2004); ‘The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilisations’ (Bloomsbury Press, 2008); ‘The Long Summer and Cro-magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern HumansBloomsbury, 2010); and, with Nadia Durrani, ‘Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors’ (Public Affairs, 2021).