On this day 30 years ago…, well, let me speculate. Imagine a middle-aged Australian businessman. Let’s call him Dave (“Dave-o” to his mates). Two kids, chasing his third tawdry affair with his fourth secretary, trying to dodge a second heart attack. Doctor telling him to cut back on the booze and the smoking.
Dave is sitting at the lunchtime talk of the CEDA in Australia, and he’s listening to the keynote speaker Don Carruthers of mining giant CRA (now Rio Tinto) say that the federal Government’s stance for the Rio Earth Summit in June – lead by that silly woman minister Ros Kelly – is going to threaten the Australian economy. And Dave’s next pay rise.
Here’s what the Australian newspaper reported the following day
Stewart, C. 1992. Green policies ‘flawed’. The Australian, January 21, p.3.
“The Federal Government’s environmental proposals for the United Nations inaugural earth summit conference in Brazil in June are seriously flawed and run counter to our own economic interests, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia heard yesterday. Mr Don Carruthers, a director and group executive of mining giant CRA Ltd, told a CEDA lunch in Melbourne that the Australian stance in the lead-up to the Rio de Janeiro conference – which will be the world’s largest environment forum – would, if adopted, pose a direct threat to the international competitiveness of our economy.”
Let’s imagine, Dave is sat there, hearing Don Carruthers fulminate, and he remembers that before coming to the event he had, uncharacteristically, idly leafed through the Canberra Times (one of the more serious newspapers in Australia).
On page three, he had seen the following.
Anon, 1992. Greenhouse cynics gambling with future. Canberra Times, 20 January.
“One of the CSIRO’s top scientists says doubters of the greenhouse effect are gambling with the future of the world. Dr Graeme Pearman, coordinator of the CSIRO’s climate change research program, said yesterday there was little doubt global warming was a reality according to all the best scientific models.”
I wonder how Dave reconciled these two items. Does he decide that he’s 45 or 50 in a position of authority, but not necessarily power and there’s no margin in rocking the boat? That it might not be happening, anyway. Is he gonna think about being able to retire and leave the problem – if it exists – for his teenage children, who’ve been on the demonstrations have encouraged him to join Greenpeace and buy recycled toilet paper, to deal with?
Which way does Dave-o jump? Any given individual might jump one way or the other. They might struggle (see Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg’s book about Australian middle-managers at a later date).
But ultimately, as a species, as a society, as a political class, we know which way Australia jumped – towards ever more fossil fuel exports, and disdaining the domestic possibilities of renewables until the late 2000s.
As a species, it turns out that we lost Pearman’s gamble. What would you say to those people, to Dave, if you could have them here now for five minutes?