Twenty years ago, on this day, September 25, 2003, New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, who had been aware of the greenhouse effect as a problem since 1971, keeps going in his efforts to make the state a hub of carbon offsets/trading and so on …
“Carr strikes greenhouse deal with European investors”
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2003/s954007.htm [link now dead]
PM – Thursday, 25 September , 2003 Reporter: Peta Donald
(David Kemp slaps it down – not carbon trading.)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 376ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Federal Government of Australia had shown time and again that it was not interested in carbon trading or making any international linkages that weren’t bullshit photo-ops with George Bush. This was not to stop the New South Wales government and Bob Carr from pursuing such deals which he did…
What I think we can learn from this is that in a Commonwealth system there are multiple points of entry and pressure, and there is a back-and-forth between States and Federal Government as there is between federal and international systems. When one is failing the other is supposed to pick up the slack and vice versa. That’s the theory -sometimes both are failing …
What happened next – nothing much came of it, it all just kind of petered out, as far as I remember (if you know different, drop me a line!).
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.