Twenty seven years ago, on this day, March 9th, 1998,
Gwen Andrews was appointed as Chief Executive Officer of AGO (Taplin and Yu, 2000: 104)
She never briefed Prime Minister John Howard!
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 366ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that John Howard had spent 1997 doing everything with his power to carve out the absolute sweetest deal possible for Australia at the Kyoto conference; up to and including the threat of not even signing. He had sent emissaries to other nations trying to build a coalition for Australia’s special position, without much success, it must be said. And he had also had to make some vague promises ahead of the Kyoto conference. So in October of ‘97 he had really released a stupid statement “Safeguarding Australia’s Future,” and had promised the creation of something called the Australian Greenhouse Office. Ooh, sounds like you’re taking action, doesn’t it, but no. So on this day, the AGO got its first director.
What I think we can learn from this is that solid, important sounding initiatives can be paper-thin Potemkin outfits. And so it came to pass.
What happened next
Gwen Andrews never gave Howard a briefing, I’m sure she was diligent and keen. Howard couldn’t have been less interested in engaging with the science, politics, economics of climate change. The AGO was there as a fig leaf alongside things like the Greenhouse Challenge.
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:
March 9, 2009 – Scientist tries to separate fact from denialist fiction