On this day in March 21 1994 is an important and ironic day for climate action. Two things happened that tell you a lot about where we are.
This was the day on which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change became international law. And it was secondly, the day that Singleton Council in New South Wales said yes to another coal fired power station over the protestations of Greenpeace, Australia.
So, on that first one: there had been the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the requisite number of nations, including the United States and Australia had ratified the treaty. And this all took place a little bit quicker than a lot of people expected, (which left the Manchester Global Forum as basically an irrelevance – it had been plotted when the assumption was that it would take several more years for Rio to become a “thing”.)
At the end of 1992, when Australia ratified the UNFCCC, it had also launched the National Greenhouse Response Strategy, full of vague platitudes (all the real commitments and ideas had been killed off in the committees beforehand, rendering the “Ecologically Sustainable Development” process of 1990-1991 useless).
And you can argue that the federal system in Australia makes it impossible to get strong, coordinated action on climate. And maybe there’s an element of truth to that, but the federal government didn’t even bloody try.
And the Singleton coal fired power plant is a really good example of how we can pat ourselves on the back for passing international laws, while on literally the same day pursuing the path that will give the light to all our fine words. Greenpeace did their best, they had a court case. They lost it later that year.
And the Singleton coal fired power station has had a long life, which is more than you can say, perhaps for children born in the year 2030, or 40.