Ten years ago, on this day, January 22nd, 2015, a very good reporter broke an important (and largely ignored) story about industry associations.,
Fossil fuel companies have taken up majority positions in key renewables trade groups steering them towards a pro-gas stance that influenced Europe’s 2030 clean energy targets, industry insiders claim
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 404ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the EU policymaking process was grinding on. And the big fossil fuel companies were thinking about ways to make sure that EU policy got nudged in directions that would make them richer.
If renewable energy might cut your profit margins, there’s one obvious thing to do, which is to make sure that renewables advocates are not as powerful as they otherwise might be. And one fairly painless way of doing that, rather than picking a fight in public (which has costs both financial and reputational) is simply to make sure that the trade associations that might push renewables are, if not absolutely captured, then at least partially so, with at least one hand tied behind their back.
Basically,the fox wants to be inside the hen house.
What I think we can learn from this is that this tactic of capturing the opposition is quite normal. It happened in Australia (see Paddy Manning on what was happening in 2009)
Manning, P. (2009). The fox in the hot house. Sydney Morning Herald, 15 August.
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.
What stressors and pressures to mainstream climate scientists face (and create) online when dealing with “non-experts”? To what kind of good online etiquette might we all aspire as the world bu… turns. Who will read this? All reasonable questions, kinda sorta answered below.
It started with a (snarky) repost, as internet spats so often do. And for once, it wasn’t me who started it.
I put up an interview with Professor Eliot Jacobson, a mathematician who posts regularly on social media about temperatures, and records falling. I then posted on the All Our Yesterdays (AOY) Bluesky account. which included “If you don’t already, please follow him on BSky and also All Our Yesterdays!”
Someone who does not follow the AOY Bluesky (but does follow my personal account) quote posted saying words to the effect “No, don’t. Follow actual climate scientists.” (maybe there was no adjective in there at all, but that was the gist and tone).
I replied, saying with something to the effect “that’s a very odd post; if you don’t want it amplified, Streisand effect? Would you like to do an uncensored, unsnarked interview to appear on All Our Yesterdays? I will follow you so you can DM me.”
He then replied, “idea, do good interviews.“
I replied with something like “ah, doubling down. Okay, fine. The offer still stands. An uncensored unedited interview where you can say what you want. The last question is always “anything else you want to say?”
Then, crickets.
I don’t have proof of this because he both blocked the All Our Yesterdays account
and deleted his quote post, which meant the replies went with it. (1)
Samaras’ bio btw is thus
Climate, energy, emerging tech, resilience, & policy professor. Carnegie Mellon Univ. Institute for Energy Innovation Director. Former Biden-Harris White House OSTP Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition. Personal account. He/Him. costasamaras.com
So what?
There is an easy victim-y (narcissistic) narrative that you can build about “brittle mainstream climate scientists who are frustrated at what they perceive to be amateurs muscling in on their turf with unnecessarily apocalyptic rhetoric.”
The other half of this tedious narrative is “amateur truth-tellers blatantly trolled, dismissed etc” And then there’s the whole battle about who blocked, you know, etc.
Yawn. YAWN.
Besides being boring, there are two other reasons not to go down that route. First, it would probably be unfair to Prof Samaras (see below). Second, it would be unproductive, a waste of bandwidth and a missed opportunity to think about slightly deeper questions.
So, I’d like to try both an immediate and a longer term contextualization asking the question, how do we expect scientists to behave on The Internet? (btw they are human beings, with all of the capacities that ordinary human beings have.)
So let’s try, without being patronizing or condescending, to put this in context.
First,, anyone can have a bad day on the internet, and everyone does have bad days on the internet. I have had at least my fair share of bad days, and have been met with both hostility back, but also grace and compassion, etc.
Second, the specifics, -and this again, was without me trying to either make excuses for Samaras who possibly regrets his action (or doesn’t; that ‘s kind of irrelevant.)
If you had worked very hard on the most important issue that humans face, and you had slogged your guts out working for the Biden White House trying to get better energy policy through, then January 20, 2025, which is when this interaction happened, would be a very, very shitty day.
The goons and the loons have now taken over the White House and are going to destroy pretty much everything that you’ve built, except maybe some bits that the oil companies like around Direct Air Capture and CCS. (leaving the Paris agreement, drill baby drill).
They’re also destroying the last lingering shreds of any credible response to the dominating issue of the 21st century. And they’re able to do this because they have convinced enough people that climate change is not an/the existential threat in the democracy
This is a very, very sucky day for someone who had, as per Leonard Cohen, been sentenced to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within (2).
But wait, there’s more
There is a deeper problem for “mainstream” climate scientists. How do they respond – if at all – to people who do not have their extensive training and access to information, chiming in? How do they respond to what they probably perceive as irresponsible edge-lording, people who are saying it’s worse than it is in order to generate clicks or attention?
This can be personally galling, especially if the putative edge-lord has either a lot of followers or a disproportionate impact on conversations that you are trying to have.
And the danger goes back as far as at least as far as Paul Ehrlich et al in the late 60s, early 70s. If there are people out there saying it’s going to be a disaster really, really soon, and then there is not a disaster really, really soon, this makes the job of maintaining public concern, and policymaker interest that much harder.
So mainstream climate scientists with big social media footprints feel an obligation to stamp down what they perceive to be “unhelpful alarmists.”
And let’s not pretend over here on the apocalyptic climate end of things, that there haven’t been unhelpful apocalyptic alarmists – Guy McPherson comes to mind,
So as Samaras would see it, he is trying to prevent the spread of unhelpful disinformation, albeit by, erm, amplifying it (I think my opening sentence, that this was an odd action probably pissed him off because it was true).
I don’t know, perhaps Samaras also looked at the interview and felt that there were no challenging questions. This is absolutely fair, there were no challenging questions, which is something that I won’t do again. I did it consciously on this occasion, because it was my first interview with Eliot Jacobson (3).
What’s at stake?
So we need to understand how there are climate scientists who feel themselves caught in the middle trying to explain to a public that is largely confused and misinformed that, “yes, it’s very bad,” without giving in to “it’s so bad that we can’t do anything.” And I don’t know what Prof Samaras’ opinion of Eliot Jacobson is, but I can guess.
But let’s take a broader historical view. The first person to bring carbon dioxide build up to public attention (ish) in the 20th century was not a climatologist or a meteorologist. He was a steam engineer, Guy Callendar. It turns out that sometimes outsiders see things the insiders – in love with existing theories – do not. As per Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions etc.
Secondly, let’s remember how James Hansen was treated in 1988-89 as an irresponsible outlier who was premature in saying that the “Greenhouse Effect” was here.
Now, I am not comparing Eliot Jacobson to James Hansen. That would be foolish, but I wouldpoint out that Hansen is still publishing, still on the record. He’s saying it’s going to be really bad. (4) I
Finally, I’ve tried to avoid pop psychology and cod-Freudianism and saying that this is all about jealousy and wanting attention, feeling aggrieved or whatever. I probably haven’t succeeded. It’s hard to talk about other people’s positionality and potential emotional responses without coming across as a superior tool.
Fear factor: Things are getting worse quicker than mainstream scientists said they would
Anyone with much knowledge and even a small amount of imagination (or indeed direct experience of the 1 in a 100 year events that roll around every year or two) is going to be scared.
I think everyone feels scared.
The carbon sinks are failing, it seems. That doesn’t mean we’re all going to drown/cook next week, but it DOES mean shit is getting real for people who assumed their wealth (relative or absolute) would help them ride it out.
But it’s harder for some than others perhaps. If I were a climate scientist devoted to models, projections and predictions, then as well as feeling scared, I would feel frustrated and perhaps a little bit humiliated and out of my depth. The thing that I thought was, if not controllable, that at least predictable, turns out not to be.
I would be looking for outlets for that frustration, and I would find outlets. One would probably pointing at people who might have had the temerity to be closer to seeing what was actually unfolding (or unravelling) but having done so without having the exact qualifications. I’d be particularly pissed off by people using language that I had considered intemperate, but was now becoming a little bit harder to dismiss.
And if I’d spent 4 years building policy to see it torn up, I’d be sore. And I’d be thinking about another person who spent four years in a Democratic Party controlled White House trying to make energy policy work, Gus Speth, who was in the Carter Whitehouse.
So what do we learn?
Well, if you come this far, you’ll be saying “not as much as I needed to for the return on investment.”
As far as I can tell, this (drumroll please) we need to be as kind as possible to each other on the internet. That’s it. That is all I got.
Doing this is difficult because a) “human nature” and b) the algorithms and the snark possibilities seemingly baked in (6).
Secondly, over the next four years, and however long after that, we are going to see more of these sorts of flash points with mainstream climate scientists feeling hemmed in and ignored and attacked or whatever.
We should also remember that these scientists are getting it in the neck big time from “the right” and so forth and so forth,
So all I can say is, let’s try to be as kind and compassionate and patient with people, Short of tolerating racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, etc, or if tolerating it, being aware of the dangers of validating it, encouraging it, etc.
This stuff is all really, really difficult. If it weren’t difficult, we’d be much better at having a sustained public sphere and dialogs between experts, be they natural scientists, social scientists, whatever, people with non-accredited knowledge, and the “broader public”
But we suck at it,
Footnotes
As well as some weird snark from some rando, I also was then accused of blocking Costas and lectured about being an intellectual, etc. It’s all somewhat tedious. The person did apologize, which is a rarity on the internet. Here’s the receipts.
Again, perhaps Samaras rolls like this all the time? I’m just trying to lay out one scenario to explain how this came to be. It might not be right. It might not be appreciated. Whatever.
But I digress – this post is not about me, or should not be about me, trying to tidy up my reputation or display my bona fides, because, frankly, who cares?
I don’t know what (if anything) Hansen has said about Jacobson’s efforts, but I’d be interested if anyone knows any more.
I did not handle all the interactions perfectly. For example, when proving my bona fides again, who cares? I linked to a different piece that I put on Nature Climate Change.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 397ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Obama had already done everything he was going to do on climate change (i.e. nowt). He had been unwilling to spend political capital in 2009-10 to overcome Republican opposition, since getting some healthcare through was his main game. But it was the beginning of his second term, and small l-liberals needed to keep projecting Hope onto him, and churning out listicles like this.
What I think we can learn from this
Ooof. We believe, or pretend to believe, what we want about Saviour Politicians.
What happened next
The emissions kept climbing. What else is there to say, really?
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.
Professor Eliot Jacobson (bio here) runs climatecasino.net and is a prolific user of social media (Twitter and BlueSky) to communicate the true depths of our climate predicament. He kindly agreed to an email interview, printed in full below.
1. Do you remember when and how you first heard about “the greenhouse effect” and what your initial response was? It was in College in about 1976 when I was taking freshman physics. At the time I learned that we were about 1/2° Fahrenheit above pre-industrial with predictions of going 1° above by the turn of the century. My response at the time was that of course it was real but that it was not yet of great significance. Nevertheless, I was an environmentalist at the time and by 1977 I was attending Earth Day. It’s been on my mind ever since, especially since Reagan took office in 1981.
2. When and “why” (e.g. was there a particular impetus) did you decide to devote serious time to educating other people about climate change? I’ve always done this as an academic. I try and find things that are true and publish them for free so that everyone can see the information and do their best with it. My philosophy has always been that knowledge serves the greatest good in the public domain. Publish research in journals – free. And when I was in the casino industry, my motto was always to give it away for free. So that’s what I did in retirement when I first came upon climate data in about 2019, I just did what I always do, think about ways to present the information that sheds some new light and give it away. It was just a continuation of what I’ve always done, only the topic was new.
3. What posts/activities have you been proudest of? If you were to ask my wife her reaction to this question, she would tell you that I strongly dislike the word “pride.” I am not proud of anything. I consider that to be purely self-serving and not at all what I am after in my life. However, I do have goals. For example, one of my goals was to appear on mainstream media and give an honest opinion about the future of civilization in a way that hasn’t been said before. I’ve now been on CNN international 4 times and have been able to do just that.
4. You write “However, my intention is to continue writing about the fall of global industrial civilization and the sad times that lie ahead. I hope to educate as well as to move people towards positive action within themselves and in the world. Yes, I support action, not complacency. I don’t expect to make a difference with those who deny science. Banging my head against a wall is not an activity I find worthwhile. For those who have at least one toe in the real world, I hope what I post here makes a difference.”
What do you think have been some of the most effective positive actions over the last few years, either in the usa or globally? I have no interest in trying to maintain civilization or prolong it through green energy, solar, wind, electric vehicles, or any other mechanism that keeps civilization growing for just a few more years. At this point in the story, there is no such thing as sustainable. Humans are a cancer on this beautiful planet, and the most positive action will come when we stop ransacking it for just a few more years of growth. Positive action means doing everything we can to maintain what we can of the planet for whatever comes after humans. For me personally this means feeding critters, walking instead of using any vehicle of any type, volunteering for non-profits whose mission is consistent with this view, and sharing information to help others make decisions along the same lines.
Thirty years ago, on this day, January 20th, 1995, ACFto get the ALP to be less crap.
The Federal Government should increase its spending on the environment by $3.3 billion in the May Budget to repair damage to the nation’s land, water and air, the Australian Conservation Foundation said yesterday. Government spending on the environment was paltry, the foundation’s 1995 Budget submission said. About $820 million was spent nationally last year, which amounted to 0.2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. A carbon tax would fund about one third of the foundation’s proposed $3.3 billion spending increase on energy efficiency, public transport, clean industry production and sustainable agriculture. The tax levied at $2.20 a tonne of carbon dioxide among fossil fuel suppliers would raise $850 million, the submission said. Other revenue-raising measures included the elimination of some diesel rebates, an agricultural water-use levy, increases to personal income taxes and wealth and capital gains taxes. Industry and farming groups are opposed to a carbon tax.
Milburn, C. 1995. ACF Calls For $3.3b On Environment. The Age, 21 January, p.7.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was ACF put out it’s all singing, all dancing “gee it would be great if we get a carbon tax” submission ahead of a couple of round tables to be held two weeks later, (the green performance at the pro-round table was not good, and this would spell the death for the carbon tax.
What we learn is that good ideas can very easily get shot down, and usually do, Thirty years, Thirty years. ACF did its best, but there wasn’t that engaged, enraged civil society willing to march into the policy spaces and bang on the table, because that never really happens. That’s not how our societies are currently built.
That’s not inevitable. You can imagine a different way of governing ourselves, besides technocratic neoliberal capitalism. But we don’t have it at present, and we won’t, because as the disasters pile up, people will become more and more frustrated and disenchanted with messiness and complexity, and they will seek a Savior. And there are always narcissists out there willing to say that they will save the situation, if not the individuals.
What happened next
Instead of a carbon tax there was a feeble voluntary “Greenhouse Challenge 21C”. And other laughable palaver. Once a carbon price finally came into existence, it was then quickly repealed.
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.
What we learn is that scientists are definitely on tap, but they’re never on top, and that anyone who thinks they are is deluded.
What happened next
Advice kept getting given. We’ve bucket loads of the stuff.
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.
Fifty three years ago, on this day, January 18th, 1972, the Washington Post runs a story, well
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Stockholm climate conference was coming. Eeryone was still therefore very aerated about environmental issues, generally.
Plastics were on a kind of similar trajectory as DDT. They’d gone from wondrous scientific, technological gift in the 1950s “Better Living Through Technology” to something regarded as potentially or actually dangerous. And the generational shift here is, of course, captured in the scene from the film The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock’s father’s friend, Mr McGuire,says “One Word. Plastics!”
But here we are with plastic even being found in the blood. It turns out, as per Barry Commoner and his laws of ecology, “there is no ‘away.’”
What I think we can learn from this is that these problems, these dangers, have been with us for two generations or awareness of them, but some of them are simply too hard to solve. DDT could be erased like the CFCs that were depleting the ozone. BUt carbon dioxide could not, and neither could plastics.
What happened next
Plastics continued to be everywhere in every sense. Oceans are full of them. They’re in the clouds, and we have doomed ourselves. So it goes.
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.
Ten years ago, on this day, January 17th, 2015,the brilliant cartoonist David Pope delivered another brilliant cartoon. You are now leaving the Holocene… Below please find an interview with him, conducted via email a couple of weeks ago.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 401ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
1. Who are you and how did you get into cartooning?
I drew cartoons for the peace movement and other activist causes when I was younger. Then I started drawing them for the Labour Studies Briefing in Adelaide, while I was a student there. Pre-internet, the Briefing used to produce short summaries of the latest articles and academic research on labour relations and the economy, for trade unions. The unions started to reproduce the cartoons in their own publications, and eventually I decided to devote more time to it.
2. When and how did you get switched on to environmental concerns?
Again, in Adelaide, I started drawing some cartoons for the national magazine of Friends of the Earth. I think I drew my first cartoon on “the greenhouse effect” in 1990, but in the 80s, the possibility of a nuclear winter was more pressing on my young consciousness, and connected to that, the campaign against uranium mining.
3. On the cartoon, do you remember any of the thought processes or the inspiration behind it? Were there any particular responses to it?
No, I have no memory of what prompted that cartoon at the time. Perhaps there was a climate report or interview that was trying to introduce the concept of the Anthropocene to a wider audience. It was reprinted in a few scientific papers and presentations, so I presume it did the job in conveying some sense of epochal transition.
4. Anything else you’d like to say – Chance to plug any books, exhibitions or anything else that you’ve got going on…
Many of those focus on the environments of the high country and the coast near where I live, and are a foil to the daily and more didactic political cartoons I draw for The Canberra Times and ACM. I don’t publish collections of my political cartoons, but some of them make it into Scribe’s excellent annuals, “Best Australian Political Cartoons”, available at most bookshops.
<END OF INTERVIEW>
See also this blog post on my personal website.
Cartoons, catastrophe and the “long” view (even a generation seems as much as we can cope with)
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.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 356.5ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that various state governments had promised that they would create and enact greenhouse strategies. The Australian Capital Territory, (not a state), was among them, It had in fact, agreed to The Toronto target early on. And so this launch, is in the months leading up to the Rio Earth Summit in June,, the kind of thing that happens.
What I think we can learn from this is that the wheels of bureaucracy necessarily grind slowly, but they do grind, if not scuppered by new political dispensations.
What happened next
There has been fairly good progress (yes, yes, I know, not consumption based, no big industry blah blah).
Forty four years ago, on this day, January 15th, 1981,
The Carter Administration called today for a major, sustained national and international effort to cope with what it said were ”increasingly critical global resource, environmental and population problems.”
A report prepared jointly for the President by the State Department and the Council on Environmental Quality warned that excessive world population growth, dwindling resources and environmental degradation represent serious threats to the political and economic security of the United States.
Carter had lost the November, 1980 election comprehensively. Everyone knew that Reagan was not a fan of environmental issues. He wasn’t even aware of the Global 2000 report, and therefore this was a desperate last effort, perhaps to say to other nations “hold on. We’ll be back in hopefully four years.” It would, of course, be a bit longer than that.
What I think we can learn from this is that policy entrepreneurs within these systems have to try to save the furniture, that you can never look at an individual news item without thinking about the broader context.
What happened next
Reagan’s goons went too hard too fast, and there was pushback against them, so people like James Watt and Gail and Gorsuch became hate figures and had to be removed, and as per McCright and Dunlap, what the right have largely learned is to keep the edifice and maybe even some of the rhetoric, if you like, but to gut everything from the inside in terms of funding. I. And powers and so forth and so it continues down unto this day you.
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.
