Thirty years ago, on this day, April 28, 1993, after returning from Washington, Australia’s environment minister changed her tune.
Australia would watch closely the international trend towards an energy tax and the effect such a tax would have on curbing greenhouse gases, the Minister for Environment, Ros Kelly, said yesterday.
AAP, 1993. Aust to monitor energy-tax experience: Kelly. Canberra Times, 29 April, p. 15
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359.4ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Ros Kelly had just come back from a visit to the United States where President Clinton had given her a shout out at a press conference where he talked about his BTU tax proposal, which he had launched in February of that year. Kelly had in 1992, been explicit in saying a carbon tax was off the table for Australia (see here).
So this represented a bit of a turnaround, and will have alerted anti-climate people in the BCA and AMIC to the need to get their ducks in a row ahead of another battle. It will have been another reason to set up the “Industry Greenhouse Network”….
What I think we can learn from this is that issues or solutions that get dumped can be brought back because of the variety of political and personal factors. And this will be noticed because anti climate action activists remain vigilant, of course; that’s their job.
What happened next
Kelly didn’t last much longer as Environment Minister because of a scandal. Her replacement, Graham Richardson didn’t last. Because well, Graham Richardson. But then the next one, John Faulkner expressed interest in bringing in a carbon price or at least a basic carbon tax. And then the battle was on again
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.