Thirty two years ago, on this day, August 31st, 1992, a community energy audit began.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/137177083
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 356ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that everyone was running around “getting their house in order.” There was still money sloshing about for greenhouse stuff. Although the tap had dried up. Mostly there was still old water coming through the Rio Earth Summit that happened and now Local Agenda 21 was going to kick in and everyone was supposed to hold hands, sing Kumbaya, and do local energy audits and so forth, to “save the world.”
What we learn is that there was a period between 1988 and 1993 when and – this was crucial, because it happened as I was hitting adulthood, or at least chronologically, if not emotionally – when it looked like we might do something, or that something could be done. And then neoliberalism which had been there, got turbocharged because it was now for a while, a unipolar world. There was nothing outside the market.
And all that is gone and forgotten. And this All Our Yesterdays is in part a project to remember that sense of possibility.
What happened next, the community energy audits, either dried up or weren’t done or they continued to be done, but they were ignored, because the greenhouse issue was irrelevant, and it had been “solved” anyway because we’d held a meeting in Rio and everything was going to be fine because something something technology something something promises something something Emissions Trading something something.
The lies we tell ourselves so that we can turn over and go back to sleep and not challenge power are astonishing. Challenging power is very very costly because power by definition can make your life miserable. And here 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.
Also on this day:
August 31, 1998 – Green dollar growing on trees?
August 31, 2011 – anti-carbon tax protesters call Anthony Albanese a “maggot”