Fourteen years ago, on this day, November 7th, 2012,
2012 Energy White Paper released. Dreadful of course.
https://www.aip.com.au/sites/default/files/download-files/2017-09/Energy_%20White_Paper_2012-.pdf
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 395ppm. As of 2026, 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 policy elites had been ripping shreds off each other in public on climate change since 2006. There had been an horrendous battle over a carbon price, and this had been a pyrrhic victory for Julia Gillard’s minority government.
The specific context was that every few years there’s an energy white paper which purports to say the direction of travel for the federal government about what they want to see happen. Perhaps the most consequential of these was the 2004 white paper with its dreams of massive expansion of LNG, and so on this 2012 paper was regarded as tripe, and it’s hardly a surprise that there was little appetite for trying to integrate environmental thinking. At this point, the attitude will have been, “well, the greenies have got their ARENA and CEFC, what more do they want?”
What I think we can learn from this – we don’t have the governance structures. And we won’t. Oh well.
What happened next. This energy white paper, I think, sank without trace, like lots of the others. One wonders if these are really just busy work schemes to keep civil servants, relatively junior civil servants, feeling like they matter (not to be too cynical or anything).
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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.
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Also on this day:
November 7, 1973 – Energy security avant la Ukraine: Nixon announces “Project Independence”
November 7, 1997 – Australian governments bang heads in pre-Kyoto bash
November 7, 2000 – Australian “The Heat is on” report released
November 7, 2001 – Australian Conservation Foundation bluffs in support of Kyoto ratification