Life After Oil: An Activist's Analysis. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, April, 2001 by Royce Turner

The Carbon War. Dispatches from the End of the Oil Century. Jeremy Leggett. Allen Lane: The Penguin Press. [pound]20.00. 338 pages. ISBN 0-713-99360-X.

Environmental issues have never been more prominent on international and domestic political agendas. Flooding in Britain, melting permafrost in the Arctic, earthquakes in South America, hurricanes in North America are increasingly being blamed on pollution and environmental mismanagement. World leaders meet at summits, and disagree on what to do. So little gets done and the problems elucidated in this book will continue.

Jeremy Leggett was formerly an academic at Imperial College in London. His task there was to train other people how to look for oil. Undergoing a conversion of conscience, he left Imperial to work as a scientific adviser for Greenpeace. Latterly, he has headed a company promoting solar power.

Anyone who wishes to find an eyewitness account of attempts to make politicians and industrialists aware of environmental issues will find it here. This book charts an odyssey from the establishing of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change by the United Nations in 1988, to the climate Summit in Kyoto in 1997. It is a readable book, descriptive rather than analytical, but well-informed in a journalistic kind of way. Do not expect a neutral, objective account of the case for and against the burning of fossil fuels. This is a polemic, although polemics can be more fun to read than neutral, objective accounts.

Mr Leggett is obviously a well-travelled man. His book reads like a travelogue. 'Left Australia, next stop Japan'. It is organised round diary entries such as 'October 1990, Tarawa Atoll, Republic of Kiribati', and 'June 1991, Roveniemi, Finland', followed by observations of some chicanery by politicians or industrialists, claiming some none existent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or exchanging one phrase for another in order to obfuscate meanings. But should anyone actually be surprised at that? Is it not to be considered normal behaviour for that genre?

Globalised capitalism, if not environmentally sensitive, undoubtedly does understand finance, profit, bad risk. Jeremy Leggett's most important realisation as a Greenpeace activist was that switching campaigning to the insurance companies -- pointing out to them how much they would have to pay out for the damage brought about by hurricanes, typhoons and flooding -- was more likely to be successful than expecting a sudden spiritual awakening amongst multi-national oil company executives.

In the past, countries living under putative Communist regimes may have contributed to environmental damage, but at the heart of the problem of international pollution then and now is globalised capitalism. The fuel of international capitalism is profit, and the profits accrue to specific interests: shareholders; investors; 'entrepreneurs'. But the environmental damage caused by the version of industrialism pursued under capitalism diffuse and, in any case, probably will not fall on what Marx used to call the bourgeoisie. International governance is still so weak that, even if there were a willingness to do something about it, globalised capitalism would be difficult to control. The defining characteristic of the entrepreneur is supposed to be the willingness to take risks in order to produce profit. It was never so simple as this romantic myth. But even if it was, taking risk is not much of a gamble when the costs of the excess and misadventure fall upon someone else.

Royce Turner is a Research Fellow in Sheffield Hallam University.