Having inhabited in one lifetime the wildly disparate roles of oilman, environmental activist, and entrepreneur, Jeremy Leggett is something of a shape shifter. His ability to knit those contradictory choices into a coherent, influential legacy-that of a man who helped put and keep climate change at the top of the global agenda-is remarkable. It is also a testament to a mind able to dive below the surface waters of conventional thinking to explore the deepest currents of momentous social and economic change.

For more than a decade, Leggett was a geologist and professor at the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College in the U.K., where he churned out legions of engineers and geologists to scout for black gold for big oil companies. After reading initial research on temperature tracking in the mid-'80s, Leggett became an early believer in global warming. Following his marginally successful attempts (ridiculed by his peers) to integrate his new thinking into the school's curriculum, Leggett's conscience reached a breaking point. While lecturing to a group of students about the discovery of an oil field in California, he paused and looked out at his students.

"It was a very exciting story I was telling, full of intrigue and corporate espionage and so forth," he recalls. "I saw all of their little faces looking up at me, thoroughly hooked on the romance of all this-the technology and the cut and thrust of it all. I thought, Whew, I can't do this anymore. And I walked out. I literally walked out on that career. I went back to my office and started looking for a job in the environmental movement."

He joined Greenpeace International as the chief scientist heading its climate change initiative in a move both bold and naive. "I thought I would be the vanguard of mass defections from the oil industry," he says, laughing. "Boy, was I wrong about that."

For almost 10 years, he worked to raise awareness about the issue, as governments and industry grappled with what to think, and which policies to pursue. He chronicled the backroom deals, the hijinks of zero-integrity lobbyists, and the smug politics behind a decade of global convenings on climate change in his book The Carbon War. Then, in 1998, he left Greenpeace to found solarcentury, the U.K.'s largest independent solar energy company, which designs and installs solar systems for both corporate and residential clients.

Never loath to stir controversy, Leggett has begun publicly bashing discount airlines' cheap fares as a path to environmental destruction; his new book, The Empty Tank, proselytizes about his current hot-button obsession-peak oil.

In this interview, he shares with Blue Egg his take on why mayors are braver than presidents or prime ministers, his affection for Wal-Mart's CEO, and why running out of oil is a good thing for the world.

Have things changed since the days of The Carbon War in terms of governments' receptivity to taking action or the public's understanding of global warming?
Completely. In the last six months, we've entered a period where we can reasonably hope for some kind of chain reaction. There certainly seems to be some sort of critical mass on both sides of the Atlantic. With my history, I'm well experienced at recognizing greenwash when I see it: pitiful action by industry dressed up as substantive steps forward. But that's not happening anymore. There are really serious things happening.

What's your best example?
Retailers. There is a kind of competition to see who can get to the deepest cuts in emissions. I'm talking about [British grocery chain] Tesco, Wal-Mart, and Marks & Spencer. They could have gotten away with just shallow 10 percent cuts, the kind of levels that governments are signing up to. They could have ticked the box. But these are companies that have various formulations of deep cuts. That is substantive. It's affecting the supply chain as well. So Wal-Mart is saying to its supply chain, which includes 60,000 companies, "You know what, guys? If you want to continue to supply Wal-Mart, you've got to do what we're doing. The world needs you to do this. We need get to zero carbon emissions. Let's do it together."

That's encouraging. It's not to be overstated. The world is not about to be saved tomorrow by enlightened business leaders. But it's not to be understated, either.

What caused this shift?
There's a combination of factors. It's like the fall of the Berlin Wall. None of the experts predicted it. It just happened, and the transformation that accompanied it happened so quickly. We're beginning to see that sort of effect here. Al Gore's film has been a hugely important contribution. Another factor has been the sorry march of evidence. You're talking to me now in the U.K. I'm lucky not to be looking out of the window at Biblical floods, which are submerging most of the country. So there is so much of this kind of extreme weather around the planet, and people are noticing now.

But it's also a symptom of a change in values in society. The business world is starting to produce leaders in this area. The world of politics is not really doing that, so we need business leaders. And they can be motivated by whatever motivates them. In the case of Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, there is a degree of personal epiphany in that. He's seen the effect of Hurricane Katrina, and we've heard what he thinks the effect of that has been. My tendency is to believe him.

In the midst of the vacuum of leadership on a national level, much activity is unfolding on the city level, with the Clinton Foundation's initiative. Do you think we can as a society make progress addressing climate change from this level of policymaking, or does the momentum have to move higher?
I think the cities are very important. I attended the city summit in New York, where the 40 big cities got together to discuss these issues. It was very, very inspiring. The mayors of these cities are clearly energized by climate change, and the initiatives that came out of that summit were encouraging. There is clearly a lot more leadership by both city and state governments around the world than by national governments, generally.

Why is that?
I think it's easier for cities. They are close to the people and public opinion. The mayor of a city tends to know the city very well, so they react very quickly to public concerns. And maybe a different type of politician goes into local government. I can only speak with authority about the U.K. But I'm amazed at some of the cynics who have found their way to the top of the federal government. These are deeply cynical people. Then you compare them to some of the people who are active in the cities, like [London] Mayor Ken Livingstone, who very clearly gets climate change and cannot tolerate a position where he sounds off about it and does nothing policy-wise.

You've got individual leadership at the borough level as well. In the U.K., we've got this wave of the so-called Merton Rule, started by the London borough of Merton, where local councils are saying to developers, "You know what, guys? We're not going to give you planning permission for any building unless it's got a certain degree of renewable energy on-site." And what better way than that to get developers to take climate change seriously?

That shift is the hopeful side of the coin. In your latest book, The Empty Tank, you talk about the flip side, particularly your fears about how quickly the world's oil supply will decline. Why do you think that peak oil production is coming sooner than most people think?
By simply analyzing the balance between discovery of oil and consumption of oil. If you look at the discovery of so-called giant oil fields-those of more than half a billon barrels-we discovered the vast majority of them before 1965. That was the year we discovered the most oil in any one year. It's been downhill pretty much since then. It's become increasingly rare to find 500-million-plus-barrel oil fields. The average size of oil fields being discovered today is just 50 million barrels. That is less than a day's supply of oil for the world. Consumption outstripped discovery way back in the early 1980s and has been rising ever since.

So what is your prediction for when we decline?
2010, plus or minus two years. I hope plus two. The later it happens, the better chance we have of engineering a soft landing, or a less hard landing.

What does that hard landing look like? People tend to think in terms of what they pay at the pump. But how does this start to ripple out?
Well, that's it. We've become fundamentally oil addicted in every sector of our economies. Agriculture is a perfect example. You look at every part of the value chain, and it's hugely oil-intensive. For industrial agriculture or any agricultural product that's traded on a global basis, you just need oil at every turn. From the fertilizers and pesticides, on the one hand, all the way up to the packaging and transportation at the other end. This is an industry that will be massively hit if the supplies of oil start descending and the prices start going through the roof.

I really hope that the peak oil analysis is wrong. I wish I could come up with a different analysis, but I think inevitably there is going to be an economic downturn as a result of this problem.

How would we prepare for that landscape?
I proposed to the government here in the U.K. a rapid-deployment working group that would consist of industry people who sit down and say, "Well, this analysis is a worry." It's not definitely going to happen, but why don't we just think through how quickly we could-on an accelerated footing, on a "mobilization for war" footing-move to really low-carbon ways of running our economies and our towns and villages and cities. That is something we should do-think ahead and be proactive. But that seed has just fallen onto a stony ground.

Our inability to mobilize ahead of a crisis says something fundamental about human nature and procrastination, don't you think?
And denial and control of information. But my real hope is that out the back of this next great problem will come a form of renaissance. And that is something I think we can realistically aspire to. Because we will rebuild. We'll rebuild our economies. We'll rebuild from the downturn.

And if we do that primarily with clean-technology products, then you can get all sorts of social good coming from that: much more local production, much less dysfunctional trade, cleaner air, greater energy security, no real requirement to think we have to go to far-off lands to "defend" our access to overseas or national resources. We'll have a greater facility for lifting people out of poverty in the developing world. Because you can do that so much more easily with energy that is produced locally and sustainably from renewable sources-not from the (proven) failed model of centralized power plants and grids. That isn't going to work for Africa, Latin America, or Asia.

Solarcentury is potentially part of that renaissance. What are the barriers to getting solar energy widely adopted?
One of them continues to be awareness and understanding. There are still too many people who think it doesn't work in cloudy countries. They really believe that. So we have a marketing fight on our hands.

But beyond that there are cultural problems. Here in the U.K., there is a culture in the civil service that says, "Grown-ups don't get their energy this way. They get their energy from big, centralized coal and nuclear power plants. That's the way it always has happened, and that's the way it always will happen. And yes, we might have some environmental problems, but really, guys, give us a break-you know renewables and efficiency isn't going to hack it." For me, that's a systemic failure of imagination.

How close are we to what you envision as the full potential of solar technology adoption?
This is an incredibly potent technology. Even in a cloudy place like Britain, BP has calculated that if you put existing solar technology on every available roof space, which is well under 1 percent of the land area, you could generate far more electricity than we currently use in this electricity-profligate nation.

How much of a barrier is cost?
It's huge. But I think the price dropping is going to happen much faster than people think. The key thing to look at is not price in the market, but the manufacturing cost. If you look at what some of the analysts are saying now, the industry is doubling in size every year; every time it doubles, the manufacturing cost comes down 20 percent or more.

What's the difference between advocacy and business as tools for change? Is it just about working in different domains, or is one more powerful than the other?
I sometimes irritate my investor colleagues by saying I think that the type of business that I'm in is an extended form of campaigning. The point of solarcentury is to make a difference in global warming. We tell people this when we recruit them. And if they don't express an enthusiasm and excitement for it, we don't hire them no matter how good they are. That creates a highly demanding but high-performance culture. When you view it that way, it is a sort of campaigning. And are we going to be successful, are we going to be highly profitable, and are we going to make a lot of money for our investors? Yes, yes, and yes. Because that's all part and parcel of the purpose of the company. We can't make a big difference without doing just that.

What is the trend or factoid that you find particularly alarming about the environment?
The fact that the rate of the atmospheric concentrations of carbon is rising. That is potentially a sign of some of the feedback effects kicking in.

If you had a magical power over the environment, what would it be?
I'm not understanding this question...you mean legislatively?

Nope. Pure, made-up fantasy.
Ah, a fantasy. Well. Then I'd somehow get rid of the human capacity for denial.

Do you prefer to walk, bike, bus, or take some other form of transport?
London subway.

Do you have a favorite Tube line?
The Jubilee.

Just because it's a happy name, or is there some other reason?
They have big, wide platforms and slide-y doors on the platform, so even if someone fell off the platform, they wouldn't get hurt. I don't know why they don't have that on every Tube line.

What eco-accomplishment are you most proud of?
The team I've built at solarcentury. I've done loads of things less well than I could, but I'm very proud of that team.

What eco-sin are you least proud of?
If I ever did that horrible calculation about how much carbon I've put into the atmosphere with all my flying around the world, versus what good I've done with all my campaigning success and the solar panels that we've put out in the world...I'm very worried about the outcome of that equation. I'm terrified of even doing it.

What's one tradeoff that you're not willing to make for the environment?
Fine wine from California.

Who would you choose-not that you carpool, taking the Tube to work-but who would you want as your carpool buddy?
Am I allowed to say Nelson Mandela?

Yes, you are. Why him?
He's arguably the most admirable living human being.

What's one easy thing you do for the environment that you wish everyone would do?
I don't own a car. I don't need to own a car. I live in a city where it's not necessary. If more people did that, it would be a big contribution.

Related Resources

Related Articles (Re)Born on the Bayou- Kurt Zuelsdorf Serving up Sustainability- Designer Sarah Cihat Plugging for a Better Car- Felix Kramer See All Related Articles

Related Eco Categories Science & Technology How to Guides Transportation & Travel Top 10s

Topics Alternative Energy Recycling Health Gadgets & Products Home

Tip of the Day Favor Your Fuel-Efficient Car Make Every Flush Count See All Tips

Glossary Pesticide Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Solar water heater Cork flooring Renewable energy Full Glossary

Site Resources Directory Answers Quizzes