On this day, December 5 in 2002 the Australian “Prime Ministers Science and Industry Council” released a report called “Beyond Kyoto- Innovation and Adaptation.”
This can be seen as the starting gun for Carbon Capture and Storage in Australia (it had already started moving in the UK).
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 373ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now, well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
John Howard had managed to get an absurdly sweet deal for Australia at the Kyoto conference in December 1997. Nonetheless, Australia had delayed ratifying, and on World Environment Day in June 2002 Howard finally did what people had long assumed – he copied George W. Bush in saying “nope.” That meant that he’d have to put forward some other”solutions” to a problem he did not believe (and still does not believe?) is a problem.
It didn’t hurt that the chair of the PMSEIC, his chief scientist, Robin Batterham, was only doing the job part-time, i.e. when he wasn’t working for … Rio Tinto.
Why this matters.
CCS for energy systems is absurd (CCS might have a role to play for industry, if the business models can be made to work).
What happened next?
A really good critique of the PMSEIC report was released shortly afterwards – see here.
Large sums of public money in Australia got wasted on CCS, with really nothing to show for it. But it’s too useful a rhetorical move to ever be finally killed off… And so here we are, twenty years later…