On this day 25 years ago a nutjob wrote…
Australian government is being applauded by corporate polluters and corporate front groups at home and abroad. The Global Climate Coalition, the major front group for US corporate polluters, features on its web site an article by Alan Wood in the April 3 Australian (<http://www.globalclimate.org>). Wood’s article, titled “Killing Kyoto in Australia’s best interests”, urges Australia to back the US in pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol.
Wood comments favourably on a paper written by climate sceptic Alan Oxley for the Lavoisier Group, an Australian “think tank” which argues that the Kyoto Protocol poses “the most serious challenge to our sovereignty since the Japanese fleet entered the Coral Sea on 3 May, 1942”.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/canberra-covers-bush-greenhouse
AND
The US has called Europe’s bluff, LISTEN to the Europeans and you could be forgiven for thinking George W. Bush has just sent the world to the gas chamber – the greenhouse gas chamber, that is. What Bush has really done by rejecting the Kyoto Protocol is shatter a European dream of running the international energy market, or at least a substantial bit of it.
This dream arose from a mix of Europe’s quasi-religious green fundamentalism and cynical calculation of commercial advantage. Jacques Chirac gave the game away at the failed COP6 talks at The Hague last November, when he described the protocol as “a genuine instrument of global governance”.
Wood, A. 2001. Killing Kyoto in Australia’s best interests. The Australian, 3 April, p13.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 371ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that, well, as discussed yesterday, link, the Kyoto Protocol was inadequate, but essential – necessary but wildly insufficient. What you see here is the bat shit, crazy, conspiratorial One World Government crap from someone with an academic background, but no grasp on reality. This language of sovereignty, of “taking back control” is immensely powerful and useful for the nutjobs, and they use pretty much every opportunity they can to deploy it.
So much for one fragile world. The Treaty of Westphalia is a treaty of failure, as was predicted by many observers in the late 1970s who knew that getting nations to agree to emissions cuts would be virtually impossible.
The specific context was that Bush Jnr had followed Dick Cheney’s instructions, and pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol.
What I think we can learn from this is that we are doomed.
What happened next: Howard pulled Australia out the following year, but this was a major factor in his eventual political demise.
Also on this day:
April 3, 1980 – US news anchorman Walter Cronkite on the greenhouse effect
April 3, 1991- Does coal have a future?
April 3, 2000 – Australian diplomats spread bullshit about climate. Again