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But Lindzen, and a handful of other industry-sponsored renegades, continued to misrepresent the scientific consensus to the public. Consequently, the modest deal agreed at Kyoto in 1997 was almost derailed by multimillion dollar public misinformation campaigns, corporate pocketing of politicians, vilification of IPCC scientists, and plain obstructionism by a “carbon club” of coal, oil, electricity, and automobile companies—and oil-rich nations. Leggett details the machinations of this unholy alliance, expressing distaste for their “crimes against humanity” that may have already wrecked the possibility of significantly curbing human-induced climate change. One OPEC negotiator put it bluntly: “We don’t want this convention. There’s nothing in it for us.”

Such selfishness flies in the face of nature’s carbon arithmetic: if we burn just 225 billion tons of carbon—less than one quarter of the world’s recoverable fossil fuel reserves—the resultant temperature increase of around 1 degree Celsius will be enough to endanger ecosystems and human populations. If deforestation continues at present rates, the “carbon budget” falls to around 145 billion tons. Leggett is astonished at oil company ignorance. “Are you sure about these figures?,” exclaims BP’s chief geologist. Leggett surmises: “The most basic information on the global warming debate was not getting through.”

Why? Our education system and the media world are implicated. A thread running through the book is the media’s antipathy towards presenting a sustained analysis of global warming and, especially, the attempts of business groupings such as the Global Climate Coalition to block any climate change treaty. Leggett recounts his unsuccessful attempts to interest the press in the global warming implications of a free-trade deal agreed by the G7 countries as “aid” for Russia: “An agency journalist from UPI, who was one of the few who phoned me and with whom I did a 30-minute interview, told me that his editor had gutted his story. “They took out all the references to global warming. The editor told me it is too controversial’.”

Leggett reserves much of his ire for Don Pearlman, the corporate lawyer who heads the Climate Council, another carbon-fuel front. Pearlman worked with Washington law firm Patton, Boggs & Blow whose clients included Sony, American Express, the Haitian dictator Duvalier, and the Guatemalan military. Pearlman shamelessly used the Saudi and Kuwaiti delegations as climate talk proxies for the carbon industry, the Kuwaitis even submitting proposed amendments in Pearlman’s handwriting. But perhaps the most astonishing revelation is the hold that the lawyer had over U.S. negotiators. Following talks which went badly for Pearlman, he was observed publicly scolding Dan Reifsnyder, the head of the U.S. negotiating team, like an “incandescent headmaster [giving] a severe finger-lashing” to a “recalcitrant schoolboy.”

In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, precipitating a record $16.5 billion insurance bill. Noting that “the insurance industry was bigger than the international arms trade, bigger even than the oil business,” Leggett pursues a new strategy—pushing the insurance sector to back strong emission cuts. But by the time the climate talks move to Japan in 1997, Leggett accepts failure on this front: “the most I could hope for in Kyoto was another short flying visit by a handful of insurers. His current approach, having left Greenpeace, has been to enter the market for solar photo-voltaic systems by forming his own company, Solar Century, with corporate backing.

Sadly, Leggett skates over, or is blind to, the undemocratic power behind the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organisation, and transnational corporations. The closest he comes to advocating structural reform of the global economy is when he says: “we did not want to put [the oil companies] out of business, we merely wanted them to change the way they did business.... We wanted them to help make the solar-energy revolution happen, not stand in its way.” Thus would control of energy technology, renewable or otherwise, remain in corporate hands. For many environmentalists, such as solar energy campaigners, Daniel Berman and John O’Connor, this is not acceptable. In their 1996 book, Who Owns the Sun?, Berman and O’Connor link a sustainable energy policy with democratic renewal: “[T]o turn the tools of a solar transition over to utilities and fossil-fuel corporations, which is the present policy of [governments] and mainstream environmental organizations, is to guarantee that the coming Solar Age will arrive a century behind its time, and that it will be every bit as autocratic as today’s fossil-fuel economy. We believe that a solar revolution will necessarily occur at the expense of the private energy monopolies, and that such a revolution will not take place without a passionate public fight.”