Twenty nine and twenty three years ago, on this day, April 3rd, 1995 and 2001, the Australian position on international negotiations went from mildly hypocritical to unashamedly evil.
Australian environment minister John Faulkner meets with German Environment Minister Angela Merkel at COP1 and says “Australia is not obstructionist”
McCathie, 1995, 5 April. Australia’s change of heart hits the spot.
AND THEN
The Australian government is being applauded by corporate polluters and corporate front groups at home and abroad. The Global Climate Coalition, the major front group for US corporate polluters, features on its web site an article by Alan Wood in the April 3 Australian (<http://www.globalclimate.org>). Wood’s article, titled “Killing Kyoto in Australia’s best interests”, urges Australia to back the US in pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol.
Wood comments favourably on a paper written by climate sceptic Alan Oxley for the Lavoisier Group, an Australian “think tank” which argues that the Kyoto Protocol poses “the most serious challenge to our sovereignty since the Japanese fleet entered the Coral Sea on 3 May, 1942”.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/canberra-covers-bush-greenhouse
and
The US has called Europe’s bluff.
LISTEN to the Europeans and you could be forgiven for thinking George W. Bush has just sent the world to the gas chamber – the greenhouse gas chamber, that is. What Bush has really done by rejecting the Kyoto Protocol is shatter a European dream of running the international energy market, or at least a substantial bit of it.
This dream arose from a mix of Europe’s quasi-religious green fundamentalism and cynical calculation of commercial advantage. Jacques Chirac gave the game away at the failed COP6 talks at The Hague last November, when he described the protocol as “a genuine instrument of global governance”.
Wood, A. 2001. Killing Kyoto in Australia’s best interests. The Australian, 3 April, p13.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361 to 371ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that this six year period is really where the “failing to deal with climate change” accelerates. Before April 1995 two serious battles had already been lost. The Ecologically Sustainable Development process, which came up with some workable if not transformative in-and-of-themselves ideas, had been watered down and then killed off by Keating and federal bureaucrats.
A second bite at the “carbon tax” cherry had just been defeated by early February 1995. John Faulkner had had to run up the white flag. The COP1 meeting was underway when this first bullshit was being spouted.
But then if you look at the next six years, it’s an astonishing period of abject policy failure on climate, if, of course, by failure you mean protecting current and future generations. If your metric is “keeping rich people rich and the fossil fuel interests happy” that it was a stunning success. You have Australia’s adoption of ABARE modelling for international purposes by late 1995 under Keating.
You have the hostility to international negotiations breaking out in public in Geneva in July 1996.
You have the year long campaign in 1997 for Australia to have some sort of special exemption, which sadly was successful.
You have the play acting of the Australian Greenhouse Office.
You have the defeat of the first Emissions Trading Scheme in 2000.
You have the introduction of an incredibly watered down Mandatory Renewable Energy Target.
And you have the protection of state sanctioned credibility for a fantasy technology known as “carbon capture and storage.”
By here we are on April 3 2001, just after Bush had pulled out of Kyoto. That Bush decision meant that Australia was going to do the same, as per the leak in 1998. The batshit denialists could have just rested on their laurels. But theirs is a fire that continues to burn, regardless of whether they’re winning big or winning medium; and they were winning big.
What we learn – the failure was public. There were no secrets, really.
What happened next. The failure has continued. And unless people behave differently, will continue to do so.
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.
Also on this day:
April 3, 1980 – US news anchorman Walter Cronkite on the greenhouse effect
April 3, 1991- Does coal have a future?
April 3, 2000 – Australian diplomats spread bullshit about climate. Again