Fifty four years ago, on this day, June 3rd, 1970, a US Senator, Warren Magnuson, realises what’s required, for all the good it does anyone.
(If you were bothered, you could compare with Eddie Scheverzade’s comments on 27 Sept 1988 about UNEP getting beefed up into a world government…)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Earth Day had happened. Everyone was writing articles about how booming we were. And the US Senator was giving a speech, probably reading into the Senate record, an article from a newspaper, or magazine. But crucially, this guy said that there should be a World Ecology Unit because the problems are global, it will need forms of global governance. Now this is the whole kind of One World Government black helicopters stuff that gets nut jobs in the States so riled. It came two years before the Stockholm Conference, which gave us an underpowered under cooked United Nations Environment Program. As late as 1988 people were talking about it. On the same day as Thatcher’s speech at the Royal Society, Eduard Shevardnadze was telling the United Nations General Assembly that there needed to be a global eco government sort of outfit.
What we learn is that we’ve known that this was a massive coordination problem across nations across generations, we’ve been unable to solve it.
What happened next, the idea came to nothing, of course.
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:
June 3, 1989 – Liberal Party to outflank Labor on #climate?!