November 1, 1989 – “Greenhouse Action Australia” launches…

On this day in 1989, a third of a century ago, a new organisation called Greenhouse Action Australia was formed. It cemented Australia’s place as a climate movement leader.   Dan Cass explains…

Greenhouse Action Australia (GAA) was the first non-government organisation (NGO) dedicated to climate action in Australia, and one of the first in the world. Its formation was supported by the federal government, in particular Barry O Jones, the Minister for Science, Customs and Small Business. His sponsorship helped it recruit a powerful board and funding from federal and Victorian Labor governments.

In the late 1980s climate activism wore an ambitious vision. We believed that by educating the public and the elite we could bring about a deep, equitable transformation of humanity’s relationship to the Earth and to each other. GAA rode a rising tide of ambition following the UN’s Brundtland Commission report in 1987, which called for ‘ecologically sustainable development’.

GAA grew out of a very Australian experiment in ecological literacy called ‘Greenhouse 88’. This was a network of conferences in ten cities across this vast land. Some 8000 citizens learned about the science of ‘global warming’, debated consequences and imagined solutions. It was popular but not populist; scientists drove the debate. There was no kowtowing to the ‘two sides’ narrative we endured for most of the following three decades.

Greenhouse 88 used video links between venues (thanks to Telstra, then publicly-owned), so it required fewer than 20 flights (thanks, Qantas) to bring experts to each room of the continent-wide congress. The ‘greenhouse’ became a household word.

1988 was a defining moment. The spectre of planetary peril hit global consciousness like an asteroid. An international conference in Toronto had called for a 20 per cent reduction of CO2 emissions worldwide by the year 2005. (The IPCC had warned an immediate 60% reduction was necessary to stabilise atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.)  

On 23  June 1988, Dr James Hansen from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies made headlines with dramatic testimony to the United States Senate. He said the time had come when the US must immediately reduce greenhouse emissions:

Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming…It is already happening now.

Australia’s Greenhouse 88 was about more than scientific expertise. It was shaped by a brand of futurist optimism you might expect to find in Silicon Valley. It was hosted by the staid but reputable CSIRO collaborating with the federal Labor government’s funky new Commission for the Future (CFF). Minister Jones had created the CFF in 1985 to look at how the country could predict and get ahead of technological trends. Based in an old bluestone church building in Drummond Street, at the edge of Melbourne’s CBD, it was chaired by Phillip Adams; a leading atheist among his many other qualities. The acting director was Professor Ian Lowe. The Greenhouse 88 convenor was Phil Noyce, a teacher on secondment from the Victorian Department of Education.

The reason Greenhouse 88 put Australia at the forefront was because it went beyond expert testimony to mass mobilisation. The congress concluded; ‘There is now sufficient evidence to accept that the greenhouse effect is a reality’. It called for the formation of a new national organisation to push governments to take action.

GAA was created to build knowledge and power. Its constitution included a branch structure to encourage members to organise in their communities. The Inaugural Council was a powerhouse, with the former Liberal Premier of Victoria, Sir Rupert ‘Dick’ Hamer as President. The sitting Labor premier of Victoria Joan Kirner was a member. Others included former Labor Deputy of WA Premier Mal Bryce, Christine Milne (Tasmanian MP, later leader of the Australian Greens), Ian Lowe, Jill Reichstein (Secretary, Australian Association of Philanthropy), Tricia Caswell (Assistant secretary, Victorian Trades Hall Council), Dr Barrie Pittock (CSIRO) and Phillip Adams.

I joined the staff of GAA in 1991 as electronic information officer. I was studying the philosophy of science and botany at the University of Melbourne. With Apple Australia’s sponsorship our office was full of the new computers. We used IT to minimise carbon footprint and maximise information management and educational impact. Our members got their own email addresses and Internet training so they could access the bulletin board of climate science and policy information which I administered. We made audiovisual materials for schools on CD-ROM.

It was exciting to work there. We felt the world was about to change. The science was clear; truth would win. I had read the (first) assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and cried. It was obvious that we had but a couple of decades to shut down coal, oil and gas. I knew enough politics to understand it would be almost impossible to defeat such interests. But here I was in an organisation moving at lightspeed: building influence, harnessing expertise, developing global networks, all supported by government.

Our office was upstairs in a disused Victorian building at North Melbourne Primary School. One day I was answering the phones and took a call from someone at Cray Research, the leading manufacturer of supercomputers. He asked if Cray could be the major commercial sponsor of our upcoming conference.

In the first issue of GAA’s Greenhouse Action newsletter (March 1991) Dick Hamer’s column quoted Dr Mostafa Tolba, Director of the UN Environment Program; ‘We shall win – or lose – the climate struggle in the first years of the 1990s.’ We faced the certain prospect of civilisational collapse; could GAA and the nascent global movement build power enough to force governments and business to listen?

Why it matters

Australia was a global leader but GAA’s greatest moment was yet to come. And soon enough, its demise.

On World Environment Day, 5 June 1989 the UN Environment Program admitted Greenhouse 88 to its Roll of Honour. The citation read ‘No other organisation or nation has so far conducted any comparable public awareness program on climate change.’ The amalgam of CSIRO and CFF, plus the catalyst of federal government support, had done something unique.

In December 1989 Phil attended the World Conference on Preparing for Climate Change in Cairo, hosted by the government of Egypt, UNEP and the Washington based Climate Institute. The Climate Institute’s director John Topping invited GAA to host their next big international conference in 1991, in Melbourne.

Greenhouse Action for the Nineties was duly held on 21 – 23 July 1991 in Melbourne’s Town Hall. The federal and state Labor governments and Melbourne City Council provided funding and other support. UNEP and The Climate Institute co-hosted. Its purpose was to build the movement in Australia but also to influence the negotiations for a Climate Change Convention to be agreed at the landmark Earth Summit (UN Conference on Environment and Development) in Rio de Janiero, in June 1992.

It was amazing working on Greenhouse Action for the Nineties. My only previous experience of an international event was a Pugwash conference in the USSR in 1990. (It was a workshop at the Leningrad Youth Palace and a side event at the Leningrad Naval Academy, where I questioned the Commander of the Baltic Fleet about public attitudes towards the military and crashed a frigate in the Academy’s training pool.)

Thanks to significant preparatory work by GAA the conference discussed a broad range of issues in detail. The Australian Ambassador for the Environment, Sir Ninian Stephen, chaired the final plenary which ratified the eight-page Melbourne Greenhouse Action Declaration. Other federal officials helped, such as Industry Commissioner Tor Hundloe.

The Declaration was a radical document. It called for ‘a fundamental reappraisal of traditional approaches to virtually all aspects of human endeavour’. Energy was key. The Melbourne Declaration recommended ‘aggressive energy efficiency’ and ‘accelerated adoption of renewable energy technologies, many of which are already available (emphasis added)’.

Thanks to the breadth of expertise on the Council and Phil’s deep approach to change, the conference traversed issues that the climate movement would later downplay when we got distracted by a global price on carbon for a decade and more. The Declaration called for ‘more creative jobs and more productive recreation’, along with community empowerment, urban farming and redesign of broad acre agriculture, increase walking and cycling, modal shift from trucks to rail for freight, life-cycle driven product design, promotion of community media and building bilateral ties between local ethnic communities and their countries of origin to spur grassroots action.

I was among nine GAA members who went to the Earth Summit in June 1992 to take the Melbourne Declaration agenda forward, including Louise Crossley, Alan Roger and Phil Noyce.

Even corporations who, by the mid-nineties would back Australia’s ‘Greenhouse Mafia’, were on board with GAA in 1990 and 1991. The preparatory workshop for Greenhouse Action for the Nineties was attended by oil supermajors Shell and BP; miners BHP and CRA; chemical multinational ICA; and ALCOA, manufacturer of aluminium (or ‘congealed electricity’, as former PM Paul Keating called it).

I think the innovation and success of Greenhouse 88 and GAA came about due to a combination of particular individuals and structural factors. Ecologically sustainable development was in the air and global warming was, as now, its most pressing and controversial dimension. Labor was in power federally and under PM Bob Hawke it was struggling to adopt a credible climate policy. It ultimately failed to adopt the Toronto target and after Paul Keating replaced Hawke as PM in December 1991 he shamefully decided against attending the Rio Summit, sending Environment Minister Ross Kelly and Trade Minister John Kerin. However, the government was forced by the environment movement and the rise of the ‘green’ independent MPs in Tasmania to at least debate the issue. In this context, individuals could make a big difference and three in particular did.

Science minister Barry Jones was a brilliant polymath who applied himself to complex, structural policy challenges brought about as technology advances. (In 1982 he had published Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work). Environment Minister Kelly was accountable for climate policy and took a minimal position but Jones had the remit and the inclination to vigorously explore the science and its implications. Barry retrofitted Pascal’s wager on the existence of God; “If we act as if it matters and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. But if we act as if it doesn’t matter and it matters, then it really matters”.

Phil Adams came to his role as CFF chairman after a highly successful career in advertising and film which meant he could afford to be bold and his personality would not let him do otherwise. He backed Ian Lowe and Phil Noyce to take the science to the people. He even offered his advertising nous to help Noyce engage with the TV networks to sell the apocalypse on prime time.

Noyce, who went from convenor of Greenhouse 88 to founding Director of GAA was kind, creative, passionate and visionary. He confronted how little time we had left to save the world. He was a grassroots democrat and an international diplomat.

GAA shows that ambition and deep thinking are crucial for ecological movements. We must be ambitious. If there were intellectual blind spots to our work back then I think they fall in two key areas. Firstly, we should have created a national plan to bring down the cost of solar PV and lobbied for it. The keystone of the bridge to an ecologically sustainable future is cheap solar electricity.

Secondly, we failed to read the rise of the anti-science movement on the right. We should have focused less on explaining the science and more on building an army to defend the scientists. Nobody could have predicted the success of the right’s war on science and rationality.

Around this time I went to a workshop in a fine Victorian mansion hosted by Kenneth Myer. Someone sat me next to the director of a conservative Melbourne-based think tank. As we listened to the speakers and enjoyed the lunch he became drunk and told me what he really thought about climate change. ‘The scientists’, he said, ‘are prostitutes.’

My mistake was seeing him as a mad man. To be sure, what he said was crazy, but the salient point is that he was respected enough to get millions of dollars in sponsorship from money, media and mining barons. Their money gave his views currency. He was visionary in his way, telegraphing the future.

The biggest factor that taking Australia from climate hero to climate criminal was that the Liberal Party won the federal election in 1996. The new PM, John Howard, was a radical climate denier (and still is). He led the federal Liberal Party into cul-de-sac of reality-denial from which it never emerged. As late as 2021 the Liberal government was trying to entrench coal in the National Electricity Market.

What happened next

After the Rio Earth Summit the ‘Greenhouse Mafia’ waged war on science. Politics changed and the backlash against ecology grew. GAA thrived under Labor governments but withered when Liberals came to power. When Victorian Labor Premier Joan Kirner lost the election in October 1992 the new premier, Jeff Kennett, had no interest in joining her on GAA’s Council.

Kennett was a proud university dropout. An ex-soldier, his other career before parliament was in advertising. Kennett and John Howard were brilliant culture warriors, elites who maintained power by constructing an imagined elite who they blamed for the suffering of ordinary people. 

Kennett once sent a proposal to captains of industry for them to fund a new think tank to take back the political debate. His proposal came in a hot pink folder. It complained that the sixties counterculture had dominated the academy and through that, the national conversation. Business could win back the people from the experts though the media and advertising. Already in the 1970s the right was creating the horror we live in now.

PM Howard’s conservative populism suited the era after the September 11 attacks. He exploited fear and ignorance, to become the second longest serving PM in Australia, in power until 2007, by which time the climate damage had been done.

After a few short years, GAA failed financially. That was mostly because of the withering of support from governments. But the executive and Treasurer also bore some responsibility, failing to trim the ambition of GAA’s agenda, or at least its budget, to match the new political era.

My dear friend Phil Noyce had coffee with me one day with tears in his eyes. He confessed the organisation was going bust. I too was heartbroken. I knew that if we didn’t turn around rising emissions in the nineties, the future was on the rocks. 

As government funding for GAA tapered away the organisation faded. In 1995 Phil Noyce died suddenly from a heart attack, playing tennis. The end of GAA was tragic and his death doubly so. Christine Milne remembers him as the ‘glue’ of the new movement; anyone who wanted to do anything about climate in Australia always knew to start by asking Phil. In writing this piece I hope he gets the place in history that he deserves.

After the death of Phil and the election of John Howard, Australia’s thriving ecosystem for climate action in Australia fragmented. By the late 1990s the resources lobby, right-wing think tanks, conservative politicians and their media echo chamber had made climate change politically toxic at the national level. Australia became an international pariah.

For all the setbacks, mistakes and tragedy of the early nineties, I recall those days with fondness. I regularly wonder; what could we have done better? It was, as Bill McKibben wrote, in The End of Nature, an ‘unreal’ moment.

One evening during the Melbourne conference Phil took us staff to an Italian pizzeria on Rathdowne Street, North Carlton. We sat with rapporteurs including Ian Lowe, Jeremy Leggett and Bill Hare on either side of a long table stretching the length of the echoey restaurant. My new activist friend Danny Kennedy had come down from Sydney to volunteer. We took media calls on mobile phones, which were a serious novelty in 1991. We were doing an apprenticeship with the best and brightest, learning to reimagine the world. The owner took our orders and walked away leaving Phil looking  bemused. Phil smiled and explained to us, ‘He just asked me, Are you real estate agents?’

Dan Cass is a senior advisor at The Australia Institute and the Clean Energy Investor Group and a research affiliate at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney