Twenty three years ago, on this day, May 24, 2000, a bunch of silly old white men who were arm’s-length useful to powerful old white men had a meeting.
“Dinosaur business group is an embarrassment”
Australian Conservation Foundation, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace Australia
Media release – May 24, 2000
Australian environment groups have united in condemnation of a greenhouse meeting in Melbourne today, labelling it an embarrassment to Australia.
The meeting of the newly established “Lavoisier Group” is a move to discredit climate change science and bring together business groups in opposition to limiting greenhouse pollution.
These ‘climate sceptics’ fly in the face of the hundreds of global business players who gathered at the World Economic Forum’s Annual meeting in Davos this January. This business group resolved that climate change is the greatest challenge facing the world at the beginning of the century.
Speaking from the meeting today, Greenpeace Political Liaison Officer, Shane Rattenbury said; “This is an embarrassment for Australian industry. These people are five years behind the facts.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 371.7ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that climate denialists had, in Australia, been working to make sure that the Howard Government didn’t weaken in its opposition to Kyoto, and had succeeded in that. They wanted to pal around with each other under an official title. And so was born the Lavoisier Group. They had not been successful in getting any big corporates to sponsor them because they were a major reputational risk. By the mid 90s, Australian business had decided, with one or two very partial exceptions, that denying the science around climate change was simply not worth it. They would instead emphasise the costs to business via dodgy economic modelling from both within and beyond the Australian state.
What’s interesting here was that the launch of the Lavoisier Group did get the environmentalists outraged. This is an example of what has recently been called “owning the libs” at least in the United States.
What I think we can learn from this
Denialists are losers who ‘won’.
What happened next
Howard kept scuppering even the smallest and most inadequate responses to climate change, for another seven years.
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.