Month: August 2022

Categories
Australia Carbon Pricing

August 9, 2001 – OECD calls on Australia to introduce a carbon tax. Told to… go away…

On this day, August 9, 2001, the OECD called on Australia to introduce a carbon tax. Was told to piss off.

CANBERRA, Aug 9 AAP – An OECD call for Australia to introduce environment taxes was today ruled out by the government and opposition despite support from rural backbenchers.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest report showed that Australia’s economy was faring well, and that a carbon tax would be a cost-effective way to benefit the environment.

“Setting up a trading scheme or a carbon tax of broad sectoral coverage is the most cost-effective way to achieve emissions reductions,” the OECD report said.

Environment Minister Robert Hill branded the call Eurocentric, saying the government was instead focused on building economic growth with a low-tax environment.

McSweeny, L. 2001. Fed – Major parties reject OECD call for environment tax. Australian Associated Press, 10 August

Hill’s “Eurocentric” line would later be deployed by his boss John Howard, when Nick “Stern Review” Stern was dismissed for being (checks notes) English.


The depths of banality and venality. It is staggering, isn’t it?

Fun fact – Matthias Cormann, who helped stop the Liberal Party do anything even remotely un-cray on climate in the 2010s is now head of the OECD. Oh how we laughed.

On this day atmospheric co2 was 369.78 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

A carbon price was not a communist conspiracy. It really wasn’t. And it would have, with other measures, made some difference, delayed the apocalypse by a few days/weeks/months. Oh well…

What happened next?

The Howard government kept on shitting on everyone’s future. The Rudd government said it would do better. Didn’t. The Gillard government got the climate legislation through, but in the process gave the Murdoch press and the wrecking ball known as Tony Abbott all the ammo they needed (but to be clear, no matter WHAT Gillard did, they were going to try to destroy her).

Categories
Uncategorized

Beer goggles, oil goggles and not seeing what is right in front of us.

It’s 2am. The nightclub is still full, but about to empty.

You are lonely, horny and the options remaining are not as great as they were.

More than that, you’re drunk and your vision and judgement aren’t what they might be in the frigid light of day.

So that one over there in the corner, who’d normally be considered an arm-chewer/put-a-paper-bag-over-his-head-and-he-will-become-“mr-right-now”? They’ve just graduated to “warm body, will do for now.” 

And if someone tries to mock you later, you can shrug your shoulders and say ‘whatever – I was wearing beer goggles.”

So, if I told you I was going to pivot this towards a thing about climate change, you’d brace yourself for some not very funny joke about ‘reducing emissions.’

Not today!

I want to try to be All Serious and Philosophical, and get into epistemology and ontology and other long-words I learnt at my first go on the rodeo of university, all those years ago.

Our judgement is affected by, well, goggles, lenses, expectations. The Germans have a word for it (of course) – Weltanschauung.

I would say that our last 100 years or so, and certainly since the Great Acceleration began in the 1950s, we (1) have been wearing oil goggles. We have been seeing the world as an inexhaustible orchard and playground, where there are no problems that cannot be solved. All you need is to go to a slightly deeper horizon and find more of The Stuff.  And the stuff is all around us, we swim in oil the way that goldfish swim in water.

Scientists and activists have tried to puncture the lens, to rip the oil goggles (or blinkers, depending on your point of view), but we swat them away and duct tape the oil goggles on even more securely (2).

But we’re running out of duct tape, aren’t we?

And we can’t see this world, let along imagine others (there, told you I’d get the ontology stuff in there).

But the world can see us. And the age of consequences has begun.

The second half of (the first half of?) the twenty-first century is going to make the first half of the twentieth century look like a golden age of peace, love and understanding. Ho-hum.

Footloose notes.

  • (1) By “we” I mean people like me – middle-class, raised in the west in relative or absolute prosperity and security, in permanent global summertime, with the expectation that the future was also going to be secure, with ever-cooler and shinier gadgets.  That has never been a “we” that covered most people, even in the West. It covers fewer and fewer people as time goes on. But people do cling to their oil goggles.
  • (2) Vision-smission. The typical western privileging of sight, blah blah. See also John Carpenter’s delirious ‘They Live!’, for a slightly different sunglasses thing.

See also Imperial Mode of Living

Categories
Science Scientists

August 8, 1975 – first academic paper to use term “global warming” published

On this day, August 8 1975 the first academic paper to use the term “global warming” was published

“Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”, Wallace S. Broecker, Science, 8 August 1975

Apparently Wally Broecker didn’t like having been the first and offered 200 bucks to anyone who could find an earlier instance.

Broecker, who has appeared on this site here in connection to an April 1980 letter he wrote to Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas, was a mensch.

On this day the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was 329.95 ppm. It is now 421ish,  but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

Articles like this helped people understand what was going on. By the late 1970s, we knew enough.

What happened next?

Broecker, and others, kept at it. It’s not the scientists who are to blame, imo. Oh well.

Categories
Australia

August 7, 1995 – decent Australian journo reports on utter bullshit #climate economic “modelling”

On this day, August 7 1995 journalist Gavin Gilchrist reports – front page of the Sydney Morning Herald – on the dodgy AF “MEGABARE” model

“The Keating Government is secretly developing a major diplomatic offensive that will undermine efforts to protect the world’s climate.

Confidential documents from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade show that the strategy relies heavily on a major government study that ignores the environmental benefits of tough action on global warming and instead highlights short-term economic costs.

It is a strategy that threatens to scuttle coming international negotiations on global emissions of harmful greenhouse gases.

The study, MEGABARE, was produced by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) in Canberra and has been funded heavily by the coal industry, which is fighting controls on greenhouse gases.

Carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, is produced by burning coal, oil or gas.

The Australian Coal Association has confirmed that it contributed $100,000 to MEGABARE. The Business Council of Australia and the coal producers BHP and CRA also contributed.

Gilchrist, G. 1995. Secret Strategy Undermines Greenhouse fight. Sydney Morning Herald, 7 August. P.1

This was months after a carbon tax proposal had been defeated. Ho hum.

On this day the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 359.33 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

The economic models were a joke, but that was not an accident. That was a feature, not a bug. Politicians could stand up and say any move from fossil fuels towards renewables would lead to imminent and unutterable chaos, cannibalism and despair.

What happened next?

MEGABARE was eventually killed off, but the use of joke economic models has continued. Too useful not to continue to be used.

Categories
Australia

August  6, 1992 – Australian environmentalists and businesses united… in disgust at Federal bureaucrats  #auspol #climate

On this day, 6th August 1992, at what turned out to be the death of the “Ecologically Sustainable Development” process, there was… a mass walk out.

The ESD policy process had been set up after the March 1990 federal election, by the returned ALP government as a kind of payment for support to the ‘green movement’. There were working groups, meetings, bold policy proposals (including – gasp a carbon tax) that – inevitably – got watered down. The process really died when Bob Hawke was replaced as Prime Minister by Paul Keating in late 1991, but the momentum carried it on for a few more months. And so

“Finally the National Greenhouse Steering Committee, comprising officials from all levels of government, produced a draft Greenhouse Response Strategy. It was largely oriented towards investigations, exhortations, negotiation and a pious faith in market forces. The report was released for public comment in 1992, but it received little support. 

“A two-day forum to discuss the report became a fiasco. First, even the environmental groups which had co-operated totally in the ESD process – the World-wide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation – denounced the forum and refused to participate. Then those who did attend, from industry, farming, the union movement and community groups, attacked the report. They said that they had worked hard in the ESD groups to negotiate workable agreements, combining environmental responsibility with conditions to promote economic development, only to have the agreements altered by faceless bureaucrats. The officials had planned to divide the forum into small working groups, but the participants refused to go until their concerns were discussed. There was no basis for moving into small groups to discuss details, as the whole approach was unacceptable. 

“At five o’clock, after a day of battering, the shell-shocked officials announced that the planned second day was cancelled. The level of discontent is illustrated by the fact that the conservative Institution of Engineers, Australia (IEA) issued a press release condemning the report. The IEA were concerned that the bureaucrats had altered the conclusions of the ESD groups, giving the impression that the small groups of officials had decided that they knew better than the rest of the community.”

Lowe, I. (1994) The greenhouse effect and the politics of long-term issues. In (eds) Stephen Bell and Brian Head,  State, Economy and Public Policy in Australia. Oxford:  Oxford University Press., p321-2.

Hutton and Connors, in their  1999 History of the Australian Environmental Movement tell a similar story – 

“… submissions went to committees of state and federal public servants; these committees weakened or even omitted many of the original recommendations and no action plans or timelines were determined. By this stage, conservation groups were so outraged at the gutting of the working groups’ recommendations that they boycotted the process. Even non- conservation groups were angered by the public servants’ actions. These bureaucrats were so attacked by industry, farmers, engineers and unions at a two-day conference in late 1992 that the second day was called off. Several of the conservation representatives on the working groups later related that they often found industry representatives, despite their vested interests, easier to work with than the bureaucrats. In a phenomenon seen many times in environmental disputes, bureaucrats in industry facilitation departments were even more committed to cutting corners on the environment to ensure short-term industry profitability than were the industries themselves.”

See also

Chamberlin, P. 1992. Greens boycott strategy talks. Sydney Morning Herald, 7 August, p. 3.

On this day the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was 354.99 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

It is good to remember that the state is an actor in this, or rather, state administrators have a role…Environmentalist trying to protect rainforests and other kinds of forest had grokked this some time previously of course!

What happened next?

The “National Greenhouse Response Strategy” was launched in December 1992. And instantly forgotten.

Categories
Australia Denial

August 5, 1997 – Australian politician calls for “official figures” on #climate to be suspended because they are rubbery af

On this day, August 5  1997 Australian Democrat Senator Kernot called for the Federal Government to 

“suspend use of the dubious ABARE greenhouse models until the completion of a full Ombudsman’s investigation.”

(Duncan, 1997:75)

The context is this – the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics had spent the previous seven years producing dubious “reports” based on a ludicrous economic model called MEGABARE which always magically proved that any attempt to tax carbon dioxide/coal would be cataclysmic.

The development of the MEGABARE “model” was paid for by oil, gas and coal companies. Of course it was. [See August 7th post on this site…]

And the Minister would trot these numbers out, it would get reported by journalists and become received wisdom.

AND THIS HAPPENED UNDER KEATING BEFORE IT HAPPENED UNDER HOWARD.

Sorry for shouting, but the catastrophe that has been Australian climate and energy policy has been bipartisan. Labor has a faction that doesn’t want to cook the planet, that’s all.

On this day the PPM was 362.4. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

Ah, official reports, with their big sounding numbers. Gramsci. Hegemony. Weaponised Common Sense. Et cetera. Et Cetera.

What happened next?

The Ombudsman’s report (forced to happen by Australian Conservation Foundation action) came out in January 1998. You can read it here.

.ABARE’s numbers kept getting used by the Howard government. Too useful not to.

There’s great stuff about this in Clive Hamilton’s two books – “Running from the Storm” and “Scorcher” and also in Guy Pearse’s “High and Dry.”

Categories
Activism United Kingdom

August 4, 2008 – Police pepper spray #climate campers

On this day, August 4, 2008, the forces of law and order provided law. And order. Forcefully.

At the Third Climate Camp

“Police used pepper spray on the crowd at the Climate Camp 2008. It was around 6am Monday 4th August and campers had been woken to the alarm of ‘cops on site’. They were trying to seize vehicles that campers had parked at a top gate of the camp. It was denied later the same day by Sir Ian Blair that any pepper spray would have been used, but this footage clearly shows its unnecessary use.

This was the same Climate Camp where the Met put it about that police had suffered injuries and been hospitalised. A Labour Minister said 70 police had been injured.

The right wing media picked this up (of course) and ran stories about crazed violent eco-anarchists.  

But guess what, it turned out that NONE OF THIS WAS TRUE.

The Liberal Democrats put in a Freedom of Information Act request. The answer 

“showed that no officers in the £5.9m police operation at Kingsnorth power station in Kent during August had been injured by protesters. Instead, police records showed that their medical unit had dealt mostly with toothache, diarrhoea, cut fingers and “possible bee stings”.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/dec/16/kingsnorth-environment-police-inquiry-injuries

And, of course

Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, told MPs at Commons question time yesterday [December 15]: “I was informed that 70 police officers were hurt and naturally assumed that they had been hurt in direct contact as a result of the protest. That clearly wasn’t the case and I apologise if that caused anybody to be misled.”

“If”. Yeah, sweet non-apology apology. Stay classy, Vern.

On this day the PPM was 384.32 ppm. As of August 2021  it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

The media love a good beat-up. And most are in a symbiotic relationship with our lords and masters.

What happened next?

Climate Camp imploded (it wasn’t just down to the undercover cops, btw). Various groups kept the NVDA flame alive. Extinction Rebellion came along in 2018 and learnt absolutely nothing from the history. Nothing. Nada. Nowt.  

Oh well.

Categories
Ignored Warnings Science Scientists United States of America

August 3, 1970 – Nixon warned about climate change and icecaps melting

On this day, 3 August 1970, the first report of the Council on Environmental Quality was delivered to Preside Nixon. It contained a chapter on inadvertent weather modification, carbon dioxide build-up and icecaps melting. 

The CEQ had been set up as part of the legislative process that had gathered momentum under Johnson and come to fruition by late 1969.  

On this day the PPM was 324.69ppm

Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

By early 1970s, folks were going “you know, this really might become a problem.”  By the mid-late 1970s the smarter ones dropped the “might”…

What happened next?

The CEQ didn’t return to the climate issue until Carter, best I can tell. And then Gus Speth, as its boss, got cracking with getting things moving, having been nudged by Gordon MacDonald and Rafe Pomerance of Friends of the Earth.

Gordon MacDonald had already been writing about this stuff (see his chapter in the Nigel Calder book). He would go on to be important in the fight against synfuels.

Categories
Australia

August 2, 1994 – Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating says greenies should ignore “amorphous issue of greenhouse”

On this day, August 2nd in 1994, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating was on ABC Radio and

“chastised environmentalists for their attention to the “amorphous issue of greenhouse” and suggested they instead celebrate their previous victories on forestry conservation.”

(Mildenberger, 2015: 317-318) ABC National News Interview, 2 August, cited in Taplin, R. (1994). Greenhouse: an overview of Australian policy and practice. Australian Journal of Environmental Management 1(3): 142-155.

The context was this – Keating, as Treasurer, had already stopped Graham Richardson from introducing a 20% reduction target [see July 25th blog post], watered down the next pledge, and gotten the Industry Commission to investigate the economics of climate (in order to squash the issue). When he took over as Prime Minister in December 1991 the “Ecologically Sustainable Development” process was killed off (see blog post on this site on 6th August). He had then conspicuously absented himself from the June 1992 Earth Summit (the only OECD leader not to attend.)

Why this matters

Our leaders have, mostly, not got it, not cared.

What happened next

Keating’s Environment Minister, John Faulkner, tried to get a carbon tax through Cabinet, but did not succeed. The emissions kept climbing. The atmospheric concentrations kept climbing.