Thirty six years ago, on this day, July 5th, 1989,
“Following the Cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister, Mr Hawke, launched a book by the Commission for the Future on how individuals could take action to help save the planet from environmental disaster.”
Dunn, R. 1989. Canberra set for Environment Pact. Australian Financial Review, July 6.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 353ppm. 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 been warned about carbon dioxide build-up repeatedly. By 1986, Australian scientists, aided by Minister for Science Barry Jones, were upping their volume.
The specific context was that Bob Hawke had – with a nudge or three from his Environment Minister Graham Richardson – latched onto “the Greenhouse Effect.” There had already been, in May, a proposal, from Richardson, for the Hawke Government to agree to the “Toronto Target” of a 20 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2005. This had been shot down by Treasurer Paul Keating.
Meanwhile, Australia was being flooded …. With books about What You Could Do As An Individual.
What I think we can learn from this is that waves of concern come and go, but people can’t look into the abyss for very long…
What happened next was that this wave was mostly gone by late 1991, thanks to usual wave exhaustion, the first Gulf War and the successful fightback by business interests.
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:
July 5, 1973 – The Predicament of Mankind discussed
July 5, 1989 – Nuclear tries to regain some credibility, latching on to greenhouse
July 5, 2013 – that turd Michael Gove …drops plans to drop climate from curriculum