Seventeen years ago, on this day, July 6th, 2008 the grandly-named Southern Cross Coalition publishes ‘Towards an effective and fair response to climate change.”
(SMH Paywalled article)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 385ppm. As of 2025, 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 there had been various attempts to build civil society/social movement coalitions around environment (so called “red-green” coalitions) dating back to the 1970s (the somewhat mythologised ‘green bans’ etc). One of the problems was that civil society is pretty thin and captured-by-parties in Australia (though I am not quite sure what my comparative metrics are, tbh). By 2008 it was obvious that Labor could not be trusted (!) to deliver strong action.
The specific context was that almost as soon as he took office in late November 2007, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd started massaging expectations of actual action down down down (e.g. refusing to budge on pitiful emissions reductions targets) and anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see there was trouble ahead…
And the SCCC? the Climate Institute, Australian Conservation Foundation, Australian Council of Social Service, and Australian Council of Trade Unions.
What I think we can learn from this – politicians – especially Australian politicians – have now got a full generation and a bit (37 years) of abject failure on climate change. Back then, it was only 20 years…The only thing that might have saved us was sustained, non-co-optable social movement organisations that then brought broader civil society into the fray. But that was a fantasy then, and we don’t have a time machine now. We are sooooo screwed.
What happened next The so-called “Southern cross coalition” – dominated as it was by extremely timid reformist outfits, pissed off other groups within the “coalition” by doing a stitch up with Rudd the following year in April over a “better” target for the CPRS legislation.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
July 6, 1972 – “Workers and the Environment” conference in London…
July 6, 1988 – Piper Alpha blows up
July 6, 1993 – Australian bipartisanship on climate? Not really…