Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
7
the gospel oF the mArket
at the turn of the tWenty-first century, Jeremy leggett, the
geology professor and Greenpeace member who had found himself so
overmatched by industry lobbyists during the first IPCC process, wrote
an exposé on his role in international climate change politics. He begins
The Carbon War
on November 9, 1989, with an image seemingly unre-
lated to the global environment: the fall of the Berlin Wall.
1
For Leggett,
the chaotic scene of positive change in Berlin represented more than the
beginning of the end for Soviet-style communism. It also symbolized a
broader positive change that, more than ten years on, gave him hope as
he wrote his book. Nobody predicted the startling events of 1989 through
1991— not diplomatic historians, not political scientists, not even so-called
Sovietologists in the U.S. State Department. If a political paradigm so
dominant and long-standing could collapse so quickly and unexpectedly,
then so too might the age of fossil fuel energy be rapidly and even peace-
fully brought to a close.
2
In retrospect, Leggett's optimism seems misguided. If his “carbon war”
has been won, Leggett and Greenpeace have certainly not been the victors.
Even today, the concentration of CO
2
in the atmosphere, tracked in the
Keeling Curve, continues to rise.
Still, the end of the Cold War remains a strikingly insightful place to
begin a discussion about modern climate change politics. Climate science
was born of the Cold War, and the politics of global warming emerged
against a national and international political backdrop dominated by the
