Twenty five years ago, on this day, November 14th, 20The Australian Financial Review gave the Marrakech conference front-page coverage on November 12 and editorialised in support of Australian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on November 14. If greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced, the AFR argued, then the smoke-and-mirrors “flexibility mechanisms” are the cheapest route.
The AFR’s editors argued that Australia might face trade penalties such as increased tariffs if it refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, although this possibility has generally only been raised by conservative “think-tanks” such as the International Chamber of Commerce and the (Australian) Lavoisier Group.
The AFR’s editors also wondered “exactly how negatively the international community would regard a country that extracted maximum concessions in negotiations over the first commitment period, then declined to ratify, and then tried to muscle back into the negotiations for the second commitment period next decade”.
Jim green – https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/greenhouse-kyoto-protocol-rescued-again
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 371ppm. 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 the rich nations – well, one rich nation in particular, the United States – had scuppered the possibility of targets and timetables being in the original text of the climate treaty signed at Rio in 1992 There had then been an effort to get targets and timetables for rich countries into force, i.e. the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.
However, after winning the 2000 election by five votes to four in the Supreme Court, the Bush administration, or perhaps we should say the Cheney-Bush administration, had then rapidly pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol, despite the fact that on the campaign trail Bush had said that carbon dioxide emissions would need to be regulated.
The specific context. Here we see the Australian Financial Review talking about Kyoto, because there’s another COP conference happening, in Marrakesh, Morocco. By this time it was fairly clear that the Howard administration was not going to ratify Kyoto, even though they’d been a really good deal extorted, and the Australian Financial Review representing particular – well financial – forms of capital was of the opinion that there was money to be made from carbon trading and carbon offsetting, and so forth. Even though the Sydney Futures Exchange had gone under, there was still hope that you could ratify Kyoto, get some money making schemes selling New South Wales forests as carbon offsetting for Japanese emissions, all that jazz, and this is also the point at which the Business Council of Australia was fighting itself to a standstill over this very question of Kyoto ratification and support for renewables, and so forth.
What I think we can learn from this is that capital is divided, not as divided as some people would like to make out, but more divided than others would.
What happened next was that in June 2002 Prime Minister John Howard said that he would not, in fact, ratify Kyoto. In 2003 he kiboshed the emissions trading scheme that the rest of his cabinet wanted.
It was only in 2007 that Australia finally ratified Kyoto, and it was worth a bucket of warm spit.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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Also on this day:
November 14, 1997 – Aussies want WTO to scupper UNFCCC
November 14, 2005 – Downing St blocked with coal
November 14, 2013, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s 50th #climate speech
November 14, 2014 – US and China sign climate deal, in part to troll Australian Prime Minister