Twenty five years ago, on this day, June 4, 1998, NSW premier Bob Carr puts pen to paper. As per Hansard –
“It is amazing how up to the mark the Hon. R. S. L. Jones is. This very day, Thursday, 4 June, the New South Wales Premier, the Hon. Bob Carr, signed the first carbon credit trade in Australia as part of an innovative program tackling greenhouse gas emissions and creating new jobs in New South Wales. Today the international finance company Bankers Trust and resource consultants Margules Groome Poyry certified the trade. This is the first time in Australia that major players in the finance and resource sectors have backed a carbon sink plantation in Australia.”
http://23.101.218.132/prod/parlment/hansart.nsf/V3Key/LC19980604025
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 368ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Bob Carr as New South Wales Prime Minister premier was wanting to put New South Wales on the map for carbon trading. Global carbon trading looked like it was going to be a “thing”, and NSW has a lot of trees… Carr had been aware of the problem of climate change since 1971, because he saw Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich on an Australian TV show.
What I think we can learn from this
Within the system, we have smart people who are willing to see the system as basically reformable and tweakable. Will with luck and skill gain promotion. And they will try to implement various (neoliberal market based) wheezes. Sometimes they succeed in bringing the schemes to fruition, but the schemes never will (or “have not yet” if you are a true believer) delivered on their promise.
What happened next
The whole question of a carbon trading scheme fell over. But Carr persisted. And it was his attempt to stitch together all of the states having emissions trading schemes that would then combine that forced John Howard’s hand in 2005/6. Carr stepped down as New South Wales premier in 2005, and was briefly a senator in the federal parliament, and Julia Gillard’s Foreign Minister
And the emissions? Well, they have kept increasing and the atmospheric concentrations have kept increasing. Obviously.
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.