Welcome to week 03 of “All Our Yesterdays – 365 climate histories.”
This was the week that we hit triple figures on Twitter (thanks to followers – goal remains 2k by the end of the year).
It is ALSO the week that Chloe and I chose the February blog posts (via a yet-to-be-perfected online system) AND that I narrated the rough drafts of the entire month of February on a couple of walks/yomps.
So, progress.
And it is also the week I read an impressive book by Alice Bell – “Our Greatest Experiment” AND learnt some new “digital humanities” tricks (around turning things into searchable pdfs).
What you may have missed in the last week on the site
Brilliant piece by James Meek from the London Review of Books (July 2021) abt the political economy of those wonderful offshore wind turbines (who builds them, where, under what conditions?)
What’s coming up in the next week on the site
Antarctica breaking up, a brilliant guest post by Hugh Warwick, and a “no regrets”
What’s coming up in the next week in the real world
January 23 1995, the Larsen B ice sheet starts to splinter. This is in Antarctica. And it probably gave us the opening scene of “The Day After Tomorrow”, a not very good disaster flick from 2004f essentially a retread of nuclear war movies of the 1980s.
The MP Chris Mullin, refers to this in his diary entry of the same day, but I cannot get hold of it right now – will update when I do.
Meanwhile, this from Squall, a wonderful newspaper from the 1990s.
Why this matters.
The signs of the times have been with us too long before. Those poor children protesting as part of youth strike don’t always realise that since long before they were on planet they have been betrayed again and again.
What happened next?
We got more and more sure that the Antarctic is not stable. We’ve had warnings since 1978, (see Jan 26th post). And now well, it’s really not looking good, is it?
On this day 20 years ago. Lee Raymond, then boss of Exxon met for an hour (or 35 minutes – accounts vary) with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Now, of course, prime ministers do and have to meet with big business all the time. But maybe we should know what is discussed, what is agreed. And when people like Blair, talk about climate change, but then pal around with Exxon. Well, I refer you to yesterday’s blog post.
What happened next
Exxon continued to be a big funder, a funder of fossil fuel denial. Exxon, we should remember, had known about the problem of climate change since the late 70s- see Inside Climate News and Exxon Knew.
And fossil fuel usage is continuing to soar. Let’s have a look at a graph of fossil fuel usage since the 1750s.
Can you spot the downturn after we were warned in 1988 to change our ways? Yeah, me neither..
“We” pursued precisely the opposite strategy. That little first person plural pronoun is of course, a mystification. “We” might all be responsible, but we are by no means equally responsible. There is always power politics at play, often behind closed doors as they were on the 22nd of January 2000.
On this day, in 2010, – yes, another Australia one, but it “matters” – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, was caught out having to admit that his proposed “carbon pollution reduction scheme” was dead and that he was kicking the whole climate issue into the long legislative grass.
The CPRS was an insanely complex piece of legislation. Economist Ross Garnaut said of it in December 2008 that “”Never in the history of Australian public finance has so much been given without public policy purpose, by so many, to so few,”“ – and that’s before the further watering down. Green groups had called it a give-away to the fossil fuel lobby, and the Green Party had refused to support it in parliament in late November 2009, meaning that it failed to become law.
Rudd was in Norwood, a leafy, and relatively affluent suburb of a large country town called Adelaide in South Australia.
As leader of the Australian Labor Party, Rudd had used climate change as a battering ram to differentiate himself from Prime Minister John Howard, and been elected to do something about the issue. As Prime Minister from late 2007, he had been playing chicken with the Liberal National Party, especially its leader Malcolm Turnbull, and had initially rejoiced when Turnbull was replaced by the dark horse (and subsequent wrecking ball) Tony Abbott.
But the climate conference in December 2009 in Copenhagen didn’t go well. And in the aftermath, Rudd ignored the urging of senior Labour Party members to call a snap election on the question of climate policy, and then didn’t even come up with a plan B. So he was caught on the hop. We know all of this because the period is intensely reported in the battle of the memoirs. And I’d alert you to Philip Chubb’s Power Failure. Julia Gillard’s My Story, Paul Kelly’s Triumph and Demise.
What happened next? Australia entered a period of extreme volatility about climate change that has brought down successive prime ministers and left the country with enormous policy failures around climate, energy, renewables, you name it. If Rudd had had the courage of his convictions, or even just taken on the Green Party idea of a temporary carbon tax while an Emissions Trading Scheme was devised/an election held, none of this needed to have happened. And here we are.
Why this matters? Because I think you can make an argument that Australia’s confusion and cynicism about climate change and politics is directly related to Rudd’s failure to pursue the climate agenda to the ballot box again, if needs be.,
Rudd had enjoyed going on and on about climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation” (which it is). People believed him. Rudd’s popularity remained stratospheric. Then, when people decided that Rudd had been using climate as just another “positioning issue,” they felt cheated, betrayed, taken for fools. Rudd’s personal approval ratings took a massive hit. Climate was the only issue, but it certainly was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
So if you, as a political leader, are going to use climate change as an issue, you better bring your A game and if your A game doesn’t work, you better switch to your B game, which is as good as your A game. And if you don’t, you will cause havoc. And it is now harder than in Rudd’s day, because everyone is cynical, everyone is kinda terrified, whether they can articulate it to themselves or not.
On this day 30 years ago…, well, let me speculate. Imagine a middle-aged Australian businessman. Let’s call him Dave (“Dave-o” to his mates). Two kids, chasing his third tawdry affair with his fourth secretary, trying to dodge a second heart attack. Doctor telling him to cut back on the booze and the smoking.
Dave is sitting at the lunchtime talk of the CEDA in Australia, and he’s listening to the keynote speaker Don Carruthers of mining giant CRA (now Rio Tinto) say that the federal Government’s stance for the Rio Earth Summit in June – lead by that silly woman minister Ros Kelly – is going to threaten the Australian economy. And Dave’s next pay rise.
Here’s what the Australian newspaper reported the following day
Stewart, C. 1992. Green policies ‘flawed’. The Australian, January 21, p.3.
“The Federal Government’s environmental proposals for the United Nations inaugural earth summit conference in Brazil in June are seriously flawed and run counter to our own economic interests, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia heard yesterday. Mr Don Carruthers, a director and group executive of mining giant CRA Ltd, told a CEDA lunch in Melbourne that the Australian stance in the lead-up to the Rio de Janeiro conference – which will be the world’s largest environment forum – would, if adopted, pose a direct threat to the international competitiveness of our economy.”
Let’s imagine, Dave is sat there, hearing Don Carruthers fulminate, and he remembers that before coming to the event he had, uncharacteristically, idly leafed through the Canberra Times (one of the more serious newspapers in Australia).
“One of the CSIRO’s top scientists says doubters of the greenhouse effect are gambling with the future of the world. Dr Graeme Pearman, coordinator of the CSIRO’s climate change research program, said yesterday there was little doubt global warming was a reality according to all the best scientific models.”
I wonder how Dave reconciled these two items. Does he decide that he’s 45 or 50 in a position of authority, but not necessarily power and there’s no margin in rocking the boat? That it might not be happening, anyway. Is he gonna think about being able to retire and leave the problem – if it exists – for his teenage children, who’ve been on the demonstrations have encouraged him to join Greenpeace and buy recycled toilet paper, to deal with?
But ultimately, as a species, as a society, as a political class, we know which way Australia jumped – towards ever more fossil fuel exports, and disdaining the domestic possibilities of renewables until the late 2000s.
As a species, it turns out that we lost Pearman’s gamble. What would you say to those people, to Dave, if you could have them here now for five minutes?
On this day, Jan 19, in 2015 “four of Europe’s biggest power utilities, represented in Brussels by Eurelectric, have decided to leave the European Commission’s CCS Technology Platform ZEP.“
The four were Germany’s RWE AG, France’s Electricite de France, Sweden’s Vattenfall AB and Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa.
The ZEP had been set up in the mid-2000s as “a coalition of companies, scientists and environmental groups seeking ways to capture and bury heat-trapping carbon emissions mainly from the exhausts of coal, oil and gas-fired power plants.”
“Of the move, Bellona Europa Director Jonas Helseth said: – In their poorly concealed attempts to attain capacity payments, Europe’s utilities have misused the trust of the European Commission and Europe’s CCS community. It’s shameless how Eurelectric proudly announces the formation of a new CCS taskforce and ‘calls on policymakers to push ahead’, while simultaneously pulling out of Europe’s largest and widest coalition working on CCS.”
What happened next
Is there any CCS?
Why this matters.
We keep assuming we can deploy these technologies at massive scale, rapidly, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s one of the ways we avoid looking at how much some of us are emitting. There is trouble ahead.
“A major new effort to develop jobs which protect the environment”, was how the January 18 joint statement by the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Australian Conservation Foundation described their joint Green Jobs in Industry Plan. The scheme was launched at the Visyboard Paper and Cardboard Recycling Plant in Melbourne by Peter Baldwin, minister for higher education and employment services.”
This came at the tail end of concern about “Ecologically Sustainable Development.” Its champion, Bob Hawke, had been toppled, the new Prime Minister (Paul Keating) was not – to put it mildly – a fan of environmentalists and their concerns. The whole thing must have seemed doomed (and it was).
What happened next? Well, does Australia have the environmental jobs sector it could/should have? Or the carbon tax (the ACTU had a role, in 1995, of scuppering one).
Why this matters – we need to realise that getting greenies and union types together is a lot harder than it looks/”should” be. We need to think about previous failed efforts, and why they failed. But we tend not to, because it would raise awkward questions and make us feel bad.
On January 17th 2007, fifteen years ago today, a joint letter was penned and signed by scientists and evangelical leaders in the US, in which they stated ‘We declare that every sector of our nation’s leadership—religious, scientific, business, political, and educational—must act now to work toward the fundamental change in values, lifestyles, and public policies required to address these worsening problems before it is too late. There is no excuse for further delays.’
In the autumn of last year, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion, came together for the first time to make a joint statement. In their statement, they warned of the urgency of environmental sustainability, its impact on poverty, and the importance of global cooperation. Pope Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and the Archbishop of Canterbury together asked people to pray, stating ‘We call on everyone to endeavour to listen to the cry of the earth and of people who are poor, examining their behaviour and pledging meaningful sacrifices for the sake of the earth which God has given us.’
What does a faith perspective offer in a climate emergency? What should Christians be saying and doing?
Full disclosure – I am a CofE priest in England. My response to these statements comes unapologetically from this perspective. The first statement is from the US, which is a very different faith context to here in the UK. So, this is a personal reflection on what faithful response to climate issues can be. It won’t be to everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s all I have to give.
I mentioned in a recent book (1) that I’d had a conversation with a minister who expressed reticence about engaging with ‘green issues’ as they were worried about the time this would take away from mission and evangelism – from the work of getting people into church. It is a fundamental calling of Christians to reach out and grow disciples, but it is also a fundamental calling to steward creation. The former seems to take precedence in a way that sounds dangerously close to a capitalist approach at times – grow quick, numbers matter, income is key and so on. Prioritising growth has, in the secular world, led to a lot of the issues we now face in the climate crisis. In Church, we are now given statistics and targets to meet regarding congregational growth. This, I fear, leads to the very discussion I had with the minister – where creation care is seen as an additional burden, rather than integral to our calling.
This is a complex issue. I am friends with some wonderful Christian activists who, whilst the wider Church has seemed slow and silent, have taken action and raised the profile of the climate emergency and pushed the conversation into the wider sphere. They have been jailed and risked much in their activism and I deeply admire them. But I also know that, sometimes, the rush to activism has left people behind, has antagonised others, and has spoken from too narrow a perspective, and revealed white western privilege and bias. And, my own rush to ‘do’ has pushed me close to burnout.
When I read the two statements above – the one from fifteen years ago, and the one from last year and my gut reaction was – well, nothing much has changed, has it? We have said a lot, but what have we actually done? But, then, I noticed something. A fundamental difference between the two statements, that caused me to pause. The first statement calls, unequivocally, for action. The second, however, calls for us to listen, to reflect and then to respond.
Maybe, what we should be doing, as a Church is much more listening. We need to listen with our whole heart to the earth as it groans and feel that within our soul. We need to stop and give our full attention to the cries of our siblings across the world. We need to put our hands in the soil, inhale the air, wade into the waters, and remember our place within creation and our intrinsic connection to the land, the seas, and to each other.
Alastair McIntosh, a quaker and environmentalist, writes a lot about this and acknowledges that such contemplation, such reconnection with our deeper selves and the earth, will not impact immediately on climate change (2). Indeed, it may be very frustrating for people who see the urgency of the climate emergency and hear this call to listen as another way of pushing action further down the line whilst the earth and many of our neighbours suffer. I understand that and feel it. The Church is very good at talking about things and not taking the radical action that is often needed. I can’t pretend I have all the answers to any of this.
Intentional listening and discernment, however, is not inaction. And, through it may emerge a deeper understanding of what it means to live in a world on the precipice of ecological breakdown. With this, words from the Church may be less weighed down by soundbites and hold greater integrity, and faithful action may become more inclusive, more compassionate, more meaningful and more sustainable.
References
(1) Thomas, G and Coleman, M (2021). Climate action as mission. Cambridge: Grove Books
(2) McIntosh, A (2020) Riders on the Storm. Edinburgh: Berlinn ltd
Biography
Grace Thomas is an Anglican priest in Manchester Diocese, where she is also a Diocesan Environment Officer. She is also a programme lead and tutor at Luther King Centre Theological College. Grace has co-authored the Grove book ‘Climate Action as Mission’ and has also contributed a chapter to Hannah Malcolm’s book ‘Words for a Dying World’. She regularly appears on BBC Radio Four as a Daily Service presenter and on Radio Two as a Pause for Thought contributor. Grace is currently a doctoral student looking at pastoral responses to the climate emergency
Welcome to week 03 of “All Our Yesterdays – 365 climate histories.”
Last week saw the 50th anniversary of the release of “A Blueprint for Survival”, which I am fascinated by – how it was received, what happened next. But the anniversary passed without notice or discussion – oh well!
One of the success metrics (not the most important, is to have 2000 Twitter followers by the end of the year. Moved from 64 or whatever to 84. Hmm – have followed some more people, but this is going to be a slog, obvs.
Another is to have 50 guest posts, with 25 of those by people of colour, and for 25 of all the guest posts to be by people who identify either as non-binary or female. For January, we will be on track with both those.
As ever, keen to hear from people who are up for proof-reading, proposing dates, writing guest posts…
What you may have missed in the last week on the site
Rather a lot of Australia stuff, I am afraid, back to 1992, 2010 and so on. But also – and am super-proud of this – the second guest post on the site, going up tomorrow, and on religion…
What’s coming up in the next week in the real world
A couple of select committee hearings of note, if you are in the UK…
On this day 27 years ago corporate interests met in Canberra (political capital of Australia) in their ongoing struggle against a dreaded (although tiny) proposed carbon tax. The business press had the story –
Callick, R. 1995. Industry forces gather to slow carbon tax momentum. Australian Financial Review, 16 January, p.8.
REPRESENTATIVES of a substantial group of Australian industries meet in Canberra today to draft a joint response to invitations issued by the Minister for the Environment, Senator Faulkner, for separate talks over the next fortnight on his carbon tax proposal.
I could go on and on about this (in fact, I once did).
What happened next – Faulkner withdrew his proposal. The idea of a tax in and of itself mostly died (though see the Greens’ proposal in the aftermath of Kevin Rudd failing to get the CPRS through). Australia still doesn’t price carbon.
Why this matters. It’s good to see how business interests combine and co–ordinate their efforts. It turns out, that, as the song goes, “there’s power in a union.” Especially a union of corporate giants. Who knew.
