March 13, 1989  – UK Energy Department shits all over everyone’s future by dissing Toronto Target

On this day in 1989,  Baroness Hooper (because the UK has unelected members of parliament making consequential decisions) appeared before the UK Energy Select Committee, which was investigating the “greenhouse effect” as we then all called it.

According to the Financial Times (14/3/1989, page 15) she told the MPs that the Government had no plans to introduce a special tax on fossil fuels such as coal.

The final paragraph of the article is as follows –

[Hooper] said the Government was “extremely sceptical” of the call from a meeting of scientists in Toronto last year for a reduction of carbon dioxide by 20 per cent by the year 2005. It was neither feasible nor necessary at this stage, she said.

Hunt, J. (1989) Science support group to be formed at Met Office. Financial Times, 14 March, p.15.

Why this matters. 

We should remember that this was potentially fixable.  It’s almost certainly not now.  But then, it mighta been…. And here we are.

What happened next?

The following month Margaret Thatcher held a full-day cabinet meeting about climate mitigation options. Will blog about that too – bet you cannot wait, can you?

But thanks to the “dash for gas” – buying gas in to accelerate the demise of the hated coal mine(r)s, emissions went down a bit, and the UK Government stopped pretending to give a shit about carbon emissions for another decade.  What a species we are.