Twenty five years ago, on this day, August 31, 1988, the Australian press sees kerching in the climate…
Trees could take on a new value as the world struggles to reduce greenhouse gases, according to a British forestry expert.
International commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, forged at last year’s Kyoto climate summit, would put a high value on preserving large tracts of forest as carbon sinks, a director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, Dr Stephen Bass, told a Melbourne conference last week.
Winkler, T. 1998. Green Dollar Growing On Trees. The Age, 31 August, p.6.
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 the Kyoto Protocol had created putative new asset classes, such as trees as a source of carbon sequestration. In the aftermath of Kyoto – which had happened in December 1997 – lots of conferences about getting rich and saving the planet happened. People listening politely to each other, schmoozing each other, no one sticking up their hand and saying “but this is all a f****** inadequate fantasy isn’t it?” Because if you tell the truth, you don’t get applauded like the boy who said the emperor was naked – you simply tank your career and get uninvited in future.
What I think we can learn from this is that we have pissed 35 years against the wall in all sorts of self-soothing fantasies about market solutions and cleverness. And we never got down to brass tacks of radically reducing energy demand through efficiency, ending the growth economy delusion and being responsible sentient beings on the planet. The consequences of those decisions and actions and inactions are now becoming clear, even to rich white people.
What happened next
It was 2011 before Australia finally had a national emissions trading scheme. It didn’t ratify Kyoto until 2007, by which time it was a purely symbolic action. And the whole thing with carbon sinks is just a sick joke in the context that you may have noticed but there have been some bushfires and enormous quantities of carbon have been thrown up into the atmosphere, including the carbonized corpses of I don’t know a billion animals. What a species we are.
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.