Seventeen years ago, on this day, July 4th, 2008, economist Ross Garnaut’s draft report about what to do about Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions is released.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 385ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that Australian political elites had made various noises about putting a price on carbon dioxide (a real no-brainer, while still being a drastically inadequate response to the problem) since 1989 (you could say earlier, if you were being particularly uncharitable). Liberal Prime Minister John Howard (1996-2007) had twice had proposals to Cabinet for an emissions trading scheme. One of his underlings had scuppered the first, in 2000, and he himself had vetoed the second in 2003.
The specific context was that in late 2006 public pressure had meant Howard needed to do a U-turn. In 2007 new Labor leader Kevin Rudd had asked establishment economist Ross Garnaut to produce a report on carbon pricing…
What I think we can learn from this is that elites – and perhaps especially the Australian political “elite”- have been failing for a very very long time.
What happened next
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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.
References
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Also on this day:
4 July, 1957 – popular UK magazine The Listener mentions carbon dioxide build-up
July 4, 1989 – UK Energy Committee ponders greenhouse implications – All Our Yesterdays
July 4, 1996 – article in Nature saying ‘it’s partly us’
July 4, 2004 – @WWF_Australia try to shame John Howard into #climate action…