Twenty one years ago, on this day, August 16, 2002, The Times Newspaper reports
Conservative lobbyists in the US funded by Esso have urged President Bush to derail the Earth summit in Johannesburg because it is anti-freedom, anti-people, anti-globalization and anti-Western.
Browne, A. 2002. USA: Oil Lobby Urges Bush to Keep Climate Change Off the Table at Earth Summit ,The Times, August 16
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly xxxppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was it was 10 years since Rio and the United Nations does like a good round number conference. George Dubya Bush had recently been doing some talk about “clean skies” and technology, this and that.
And the anti Climate Lobby groups just wanted to make sure that he didn’t slip. So this was laying down some “suppressing fire” and to force proponents of action to expend energy in simply keeping climate change (literally) ‘on the agenda.’
What I think we can learn from this
What’s interesting, what we can learn is, this is what they do. They’re constantly laying down “suppressing fire”, which didn’t really work as well as they’d hoped. But it makes you feel good when you do it, keeps you in a job, makes you test your ammo, and your guns, so why not? I can say the language is extraordinary, but nothing special. They do genuinely frame it as liberty and freedom and democracy versus the evil globalist at least for public consumption.
What happened next
Climate stayed on the agenda. Bush stayed a prick. 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.