Thirty years ago, on this day, July 6, 1993, the Canberra Times reported on how everyone had a beef with the Keating government on climate…
The agreement between Commonwealth and state and territory governments on broad environmental issues was widely criticised yesterday by both sides of the debate during an environmental law conference in Canberra
The chief protagonists were Phillip Toyne, former chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation and now Visiting Fellow at the ANU’s Centre for Environment law, and Dr Brian O’Brien, a Penh based consultant and physicist and former chairman of the WA Environmental Protection Authority.
1993 Campbell, R. 1993. Both sides criticise green agreement. Canberra Times, 6 July, p.4.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 357.4ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Labour government of Paul Keating had just won the “unwinnable” election of 1993, despite the economy having been in the toilet. The ALP had been silent on the greenhouse issue, as had the Liberals, and the concern of 1988-1991 a distant memory.
What I think we can learn from this is that you can have two people attacking a government from “opposite perspectives” (so Toyne is a greenie and O’Brien as “nothing to see here everything is okay” kind of guy) but that doesn’t mean that the government is right. It can simply mean, as it does in this case, that one lot of critics are simply wrong.
But we so often take triangulation as the safest course. And of course, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
What happened next
Toyne ended up as a civil servant, albeit briefly, trying to get a carbon tax through. O’Brien kept trading on his time with NASA. And being an ass. The carbon dioxide kept accumulating.
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.