Eighteen years ago, on this day, January 25th, 2007, Australian Prime Minister John Howard tries to explain away his late-2006 U-turn.
“I regard myself as a climate change realist. That means looking at the evidence as it emerges and responding with policies that preserve Australia’s competitiveness and play to her strengths.” John Howard, Address to the National press Club, 25 January 2007
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 386ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that a few months earlier John Howard had been forced to begin to pretend that he cared about the possibility of climate change from carbon dioxide build up. This was because of a whole sequence of events, including the ongoing Millennium drought, the release of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and The Stern Review into the economics of climate change by Her Majesty’s Treasury. And so Howard had created the Shergold Group to look into the possibility of an emissions trading scheme. And this was, of course, stacked with the usual suspects and left out people who might have different, stronger opinions. But Howard wasn’t really convincing anyone. And so Howard was using words like “realism” in his National Press Club speech. And anyone who knows or has been around for any length of time knows that “realism” and “realistic” are code words that people use trying to frame themselves as the “sensible center” and their opponents as either wild eyed fanatics or dreamers.
What I think we can learn from this is that politicians will always try and do U-turns if cornered. Of course they will, but these may not work.
What happened next Howard became only the second Australian Prime Minister to lose his own seat at a Federal election. In November of 2007 the world got Kevin, “I’m from Queensland, and here to help” Rudd, who said he was going to sort out the climate issue. And he did as much on that as he did on the wheat to Iraq scandal and many others- that is to say, fuck all.
The National Press Club has hosted all sorts of climate talks, of course, in its long and illustrious life. Here is an incomplete precis- https://marchudson.net/2017/01/29/turnbull-climate-and-the-national-press-club-auspol/
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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:
January 25, 1994: UK government releases “Sustainable Development Strategy
January 25, 1995 – Australian electricity reforms mean more greenhouse gases…
January 25, 2013 – Lord Stern admits #climate “worse than I thought”