Seventeen years ago, on this day, October 25th, 2006, opposition leader David Cameron launches “Can I have the Bill” campaign in London, a few week’s ahead of the Queen’s speech in which the Labour Government announced its Climate Change Bill.
If you go here you can see the Getty images I don’t have a licence for.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that David Cameron had become Conservative Party opposition leader the previous year simply by memorising an eight minute speech and not being David Davis or Ken Clark. One of his key tactics was to “detoxify” the Conservative brand by embracing soft green environmentalism so middle class people wouldn’t be quite as repelled and would feel less guilty about voting the way that they thought would benefit their own economic self interest. And so he’d hugged a husky and so forth. And now, he was trying to outflank the Labour and Liberal Democrats on climate ambition.
We’d seen this before with Chris Puplick and Andrew Peacock in 1989-90 in Australia.
What I think we can learn from this is that these periods of competitive consensus exist. They tend not to last terribly long though.
What happened next Cameron kept banging on about CCS. He had a wind turbine put on his roof to precisely no effect. And in 2008, the Climate Change Act became law. And there was an up of ambition from 60% to 80% emissions reductions by 2050. And of course, we’ve now said that we’re going to go to net zero, except we’re not.
The thing to remember was that very, very few Conservatives voted against the Climate Change Act. But this is because most of them are both obedient and thick and didn’t understand the implications. And even if they did understand the implications, loyalty to your leader is far more important than any particular stand you might want to make.
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:
October 25, 1980 – Australian radio’s The Science Show talks about climate change…
October 25, 1982 – Exxon and “Climate Processes & Climate Sensitivity” symposium