Last month we put up a blog post on Jeremy Leggett’s powerful new book ‘The Winning of the Carbon War’, a read that we cannot recommend more highly.
We are now pleased to announce that the book is available for free download here. All profits from the sale are going to SolarAid.
So what’s the book about?
Jeremy Leggett fought for the light side for a quarter of a century as it lost battle after battle. Then, in 2013, the tide began to turn. By 2015, it was clear the the war could be won. Leggett’s front-line chronicle tells one person’s story of those turnaround years, culminating in dramatic scenes at the Paris climate summit, and what they can mean for the world.
The book has received some incredible support including Richard Branson, Tom Carnac, Josh Fox, Caroline Lucas and many more. Branson commented saying;
“Given how vital developments in energy and climate will be for the future global economy, a front-line chronicle of events as they unfold in the make-or-break year ahead promises to be fascinating. With a past in oil and gas, a present in solar and finance, and two decades of climate campaigning along the way, we can rely on Jeremy Leggett to provide an interesting and insightful perspective.”
Jeremy has kindly sent Greenhouse a segment of one of the chapters from the book, to share with our readers. We hope you enjoy and feel inspired to download the rest!
Kent, 31st December 2015:
Weird weather is in the news on most continents as the year turns. Floods threaten cities in northern England. Tornadoes hit America. Texas struggles with snowstorms yet temperatures reach above freezing at the North Pole. Scientists are quick to find the fingerprints of climate change. Yes, there is a record El Nino event in the Pacific. But such El Ninos may well themselves be enhanced by the warming world.
I am reminded of a question I first heard an insurer, actuarial expert Andrew Dlugolecki, ask in the early 1990s: at what point does a climate in meltdown begin destroying wealth faster than it can be created? His guessestimate then was the middle of this century.
I am trying not to let the reminders of our race against time dampen my bullish post-Paris mood. I consider that I witnessed a unique milestone in human history at the Paris climate summit, one that holds significant positive transformative power for humankind. I hold this view for three reasons: stakes, scale, and scope.
There has clearly never been a gathering of world leaders to discuss stakes of the kind under discussion in Paris: a threat to global food and water supply, to the global economy and indeed – as many heads of state and government saw it – to life on the planet.
Never in human history has there have been a summit to negotiate a treaty on such a scale: one that all nations would have obligations under. 195 governments took part. That is every independent nation on the planet, as listed by worldatlas.com. These governments elected to set aside all the many other areas where they are in dispute to face down a shared global threat, and with seriousness of intent. It may have taken them a quarter of a century to get there, but it was a display of global co-operation without precedent in history.
The scope of the Paris Agreement involves a total system change to the lifeblood of the global economy: decarbonisation of energy. Governments wrote into the treaty the common understanding that they probably need to accomplish this incredible U-turn within the lifetimes of most schoolchildren and indeed college students alive today.
It must seem unbelievable, for people who haven’t been following the long-running negotiations. But it is true.
How was it possible? Crucially, the story of the Paris Agreement is about both national actors and non-national actors. As for the national actors, the federal governments, I know more of what went on behind the closed doors, from talking to top-table participants since 12th December, than I have written in my eye-witness account. But definitive accounts of the summit for policy experts will soon be written by people who were actually in those rooms. I am writing my book for the policy experts’ relatives, as it were. I do not think my narrative will needed correcting materially once detailed forensics of the negotiations are published by practitioners.
In the brew that made for ultimate success in Paris, an unprecedented legion of key groups in civil society descended on the summit with the express purpose of egging governments on. A thousand cities committed to go 100% renewable, some as early as 2030. So did more than fifty of the world’s biggest companies, one as early as 2020. Investors with funds worth more than 3 trillion dollars pledged to divest from fossil fuels and/or put shareholder pressure on traditional energy companies to decarbonise. The list of such inducements to national governments is long, as chapters 29 to 32 show.
I believe this double act of governments and civil society is going to change the world in unprecedented and mostly positive ways in 2016 and beyond. My early contacts with the corporate world after the summit suggest an encouraging number of other business people share this view.
Others disagree, of course. They point to the inability of the emissions-reductions commitments made in the Paris Agreement to contain global warming near 2˚C, and the lack of legally-binding commitments even for those.
True, the targets themselves are not binding, but a global process capable of achieving them and much more is written in legally-binding language. The ratchet, as negotiators refer to it informally, involves obligations to prepare, communicate and maintain targets and pursue domestic measures to achieve them. It also includes provisions on how to measure, report and verify emissions reduction commitments in a unified way, with the same same frequency and format for all governments, and have them verified through an independent technical process. The word “shall” appears 143 times.
Legally-binding agreements under international law have been likened to credit rating agencies. There are no physical penalties involved, yet companies pull out all stops to stop their ratings falling. The penalties entail loss of credibility, standing, trust among peers – and of course they usually involve decreased ability to raise capital.
Only the passage of more time will show whether the bulls or the cynics are correct in their predictions. But here is mine. The post-Paris era will see the rapid emergence of a major new theme in the worlds of business, policy and politics: transition management.
You can now download the free ebook or buy the printed version of The Winning of the Carbon War here, Jeremy Leggett is also on twitter.
The post A book to share: ‘The Winning of the Carbon War’ by Jeremy Leggett appeared first on Greenhouse.