Thirty six years ago, on this day, May 16th, 1990,
“It is a country where the ambitious environment minister hopes to ride to higher office by promising to deliver the most rigorous environmental policies in the world.
The finance minister is aghast at the cost of the plan and has held it up in Cabinet for so long that his colleague has effectively gone to the people with a nation-wide series of public hearings.
But now the hearings have become a lightning rod for all sorts of discontent and the environment minister’s carefully nurtured public support is threatening to evaporate just when the Government sorely needs it.
It may sound like a familiar plot but this time the players are not Graham Richardson or Peter Walsh and the Federal Government concerned has a distinctly conservative hue – except when it comes to turning green.
Canada, with a resource dependent economy like Australia’s and a pro-growth conservative Government, is embroiled in a national debate over a government promise to introduce a comprehensive five-year environmental plan which is forecast to cost billions of dollars.”
Earl, G. 1990. Price and pay-off for the world’s green conscience. Australian Financial Review, May 16.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 354ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that from the late 1970s it was obvious that getting off fossil fuels to deal with climate change was going to cost a lot of money. This was one of the reasons that the politicians maybe hadn’t acted.
The specific context was that in 1988 it became impossible to ignore the issue anymore, and so by May of 1990 as the First Assessment Report of the IPCC was released, and it’s obvious that there’s going to have to be some sort of climate treaty. You will then get people counting the cost. And this article is fairly typical of that the business press was full of this at the time. Understandably.
What I think we can learn from this. all the cards were in the air because the Soviet Union was in the process of disintegrating. The Berlin Wall had come down. Elections were being held in former satellite countries and Germany was on the way to reunification. By this time, 1990 it was clear that there was going to be a negotiating process for climate treaty, and that there would be a Rio Earth Summit in 1992, 20 years on from the Stockholm conference.
What happened next. The cost of acting became embedded via all sorts of pathetic, tendentious economic modelling produced by so called independent think tanks, and this helped the forces of the status quo stop action from happening
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:
May 16, 1972 – “Carbon and the Biosphere” symposium
May 16, 1973 Energy and how we live. UNESCO seminar at Flinders – All Our Yesterdays
May 16, 2005 – Anthony Albanese says critical action on #climate being delayed by 20 years… #auspol
May 16, 2006 – UK Prime Minister Tony Blair goes nuclear…
May 16, 2005 – Anthony Albanese, eco-warrior…
May 16 – Interview with Rosie, about zero population growth, zero climate progress, etc…