On this day, November 22 2002, the nasty spat within Australian business over whether to call for Australia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol broke out into public., with an article “Big business splits over greenhouse” by Miranda McLachlan in the Australian Financial Review
The dominant big business association, the Business Council of Australia, had backed Prime Minister John Howard in not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol (even though Australia had been able to extort an absurdly generous “reduction” target of … an 8 per cent increase in emissions (more once you added the land-clearing loophole.
But over time, key business leaders – proponents of renewables, carbon trading etc, fought within the BCA for a change in its position. They fought each other to a standstill, as reported in the Fin, and the BCA went to a “no position” position on Kyoto ratification…
See also – Bell, S. (2008). Rethinking the Role of the State: Explaining Business Collective Action at the Business Council of Australia. Polity, Vol. 40,. 4, 464-487
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 373ppm. At time of writing it was 417ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
Why this matters.
When the business lobby splits, that’s when the fun starts. Which is why incumbent actors work so hard to stop those splits…
What happened next?
Howard held the line. Public pressure on climate only really kicked in in Australia in the second half of 2006. The BCA promptly moved to various fall back positions.
The emissions kept climbing. The atmospheric concentrations kept climbing. Then came the ‘natural’ disasters.