On this day 13 August 1882, William “Coal Question” Jevons died
Eh? What AM I talking about?
Well, Jevons (a very interesting character) had written a book called “The Coal Question” in 1865. In it he pointed out that if you make a procedure more efficient, you don’t actually reduce the total amount of resources used, because when a producer is now using less of a resource, the price drops, more producers enter the market and the total consumption of the resource goes up. This is known as “Jevons Paradox.”
And somebody even made a video about it.
And for more on this, see, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/02/16/207532/debunking-jevons-paradox-jim-barrett/
On this day, August 12, 1970 a US Senator (Democratic, Texas) had a newspaper article about environment – and climate change – read into the Senate Record. This came a few days after Nixon was warned about climate change.
Richard Yarborough (interesting life – see here) had the late-July article in the Washington Post by Claire Sterling read into the Senate Record.
On this day the PPM was 324.69. Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
We knew. People who were elected to, paid to, make decisions, were warned of potential trouble from the late 60s/early 70s. By the late 70s it was obvious enough that there was a problem, and something needed doing. Nothing was done.
On this day, August 12, in 1990 a crackpot documentary was broadcast on Channel 4. The “Greenhouse Conspiracy” criticised the theory of global warming and asserted that scientists critical of global warming theory were denied funding. Lindzen, Pat Michaels, Roy Spencer, Sherwood Idso etc the usual suspects. Directed produced and presented by Hilary Lawson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Lawson
And, of course, he got to write a 3000 word piece in the Sunday Times (the Murdoch press already spewing shite about climate change, something they have – mostly – kept doing over the last 30 years).
I wonder if Lawson admits he got that one a bit wrong?
On this day the atmospheric C02 was 353 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
To be totally fair, at this stage, such a documentary MIGHT have been makeable in good faith. Maybe. Hmmm. The denial has kept on keeping on.
What happened next?
Oh, the smear merchants kept at it, and still keep at it. “The Great Global Warming Swindle” in 2007 was probably the last time they were effective, in documentaries, but the theft and misrepresentation of emails from UEA in late 2009 (so-called Climategate) was also pretty potent.
The ABC, to its credit, did not bow to the IPA sorts who campaigned for it to be shown. It ended up being screened on SBS…
The wonderful Alan Pears takes up the story (from an interview conducted in 2015)
I was on the Victorian organising committee for a scientific seminar on climate research, which included presenters like Graeme Pearman, Barrie Pittock and a range of those people. And at it my question to them was ‘why aren’t you out on the streets telling everyone about this?’
And what did they say?
And Graeme Pearman’s response, which was a very measured one was ‘Well, look, we’ll know for certain by the turn of the century. And at the moment we can’t say for certain. ‘ But certainly the laws of physics did apply in [then], just as they apply now
On this day, atmospheric carbon dioxide was 3367.67 ppm. Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
People have been studying this for a very long time.
What happened next?
There was a symposium in Canberra, a monograph published. Once Barry Jones became Science Minister and was able to create the “Commission for the Future” – which created “The Greenhouse Project”, it started to move forward. But that wasn’t till 1987…
On this day, August 9, 2001, the OECD called on Australia to introduce a carbon tax. Was told to piss off.
CANBERRA, Aug 9 AAP – An OECD call for Australia to introduce environment taxes was today ruled out by the government and opposition despite support from rural backbenchers.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest report showed that Australia’s economy was faring well, and that a carbon tax would be a cost-effective way to benefit the environment.
“Setting up a trading scheme or a carbon tax of broad sectoral coverage is the most cost-effective way to achieve emissions reductions,” the OECD report said.
Environment Minister Robert Hill branded the call Eurocentric, saying the government was instead focused on building economic growth with a low-tax environment.
McSweeny, L. 2001. Fed – Major parties reject OECD call for environment tax. Australian Associated Press, 10 August
Hill’s “Eurocentric” line would later be deployed by his boss John Howard, when Nick “Stern Review” Stern was dismissed for being (checks notes) English.
The depths of banality and venality. It is staggering, isn’t it?
Fun fact – Matthias Cormann, who helped stop the Liberal Party do anything even remotely un-cray on climate in the 2010s is now head of the OECD. Oh how we laughed.
On this day atmospheric co2 was 369.78 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
A carbon price was not a communist conspiracy. It really wasn’t. And it would have, with other measures, made some difference, delayed the apocalypse by a few days/weeks/months. Oh well…
What happened next?
The Howard government kept on shitting on everyone’s future. The Rudd government said it would do better. Didn’t. The Gillard government got the climate legislation through, but in the process gave the Murdoch press and the wrecking ball known as Tony Abbott all the ammo they needed (but to be clear, no matter WHAT Gillard did, they were going to try to destroy her).
It’s 2am. The nightclub is still full, but about to empty.
You are lonely, horny and the options remaining are not as great as they were.
More than that, you’re drunk and your vision and judgement aren’t what they might be in the frigid light of day.
So that one over there in the corner, who’d normally be considered an arm-chewer/put-a-paper-bag-over-his-head-and-he-will-become-“mr-right-now”? They’ve just graduated to “warm body, will do for now.”
And if someone tries to mock you later, you can shrug your shoulders and say ‘whatever – I was wearing beer goggles.”
So, if I told you I was going to pivot this towards a thing about climate change, you’d brace yourself for some not very funny joke about ‘reducing emissions.’
Not today!
I want to try to be All Serious and Philosophical, and get into epistemology and ontology and other long-words I learnt at my first go on the rodeo of university, all those years ago.
Our judgement is affected by, well, goggles, lenses, expectations. The Germans have a word for it (of course) – Weltanschauung.
I would say that our last 100 years or so, and certainly since the Great Acceleration began in the 1950s, we (1) have been wearing oil goggles. We have been seeing the world as an inexhaustible orchard and playground, where there are no problems that cannot be solved. All you need is to go to a slightly deeper horizon and find more of The Stuff. And the stuff is all around us, we swim in oil the way that goldfish swim in water.
Scientists and activists have tried to puncture the lens, to rip the oil goggles (or blinkers, depending on your point of view), but we swat them away and duct tape the oil goggles on even more securely (2).
But we’re running out of duct tape, aren’t we?
And we can’t see this world, let along imagine others (there, told you I’d get the ontology stuff in there).
But the world can see us. And the age of consequences has begun.
The second half of (the first half of?) the twenty-first century is going to make the first half of the twentieth century look like a golden age of peace, love and understanding. Ho-hum.
Footloose notes.
(1) By “we” I mean people like me – middle-class, raised in the west in relative or absolute prosperity and security, in permanent global summertime, with the expectation that the future was also going to be secure, with ever-cooler and shinier gadgets. That has never been a “we” that covered most people, even in the West. It covers fewer and fewer people as time goes on. But people do cling to their oil goggles.
(2) Vision-smission. The typical western privileging of sight, blah blah. See also John Carpenter’s delirious ‘They Live!’, for a slightly different sunglasses thing.
On this day, August 7 1995 journalist Gavin Gilchrist reports – front page of the Sydney Morning Herald – on the dodgy AF “MEGABARE” model
“The Keating Government is secretly developing a major diplomatic offensive that will undermine efforts to protect the world’s climate.
Confidential documents from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade show that the strategy relies heavily on a major government study that ignores the environmental benefits of tough action on global warming and instead highlights short-term economic costs.
It is a strategy that threatens to scuttle coming international negotiations on global emissions of harmful greenhouse gases.
The study, MEGABARE, was produced by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) in Canberra and has been funded heavily by the coal industry, which is fighting controls on greenhouse gases.
Carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, is produced by burning coal, oil or gas.
The Australian Coal Association has confirmed that it contributed $100,000 to MEGABARE. The Business Council of Australia and the coal producers BHP and CRA also contributed.
Gilchrist, G. 1995. Secret Strategy Undermines Greenhouse fight. Sydney Morning Herald, 7 August. P.1
This was months after a carbon tax proposal had been defeated. Ho hum.
On this day the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 359.33 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
The economic models were a joke, but that was not an accident. That was a feature, not a bug. Politicians could stand up and say any move from fossil fuels towards renewables would lead to imminent and unutterable chaos, cannibalism and despair.
What happened next?
MEGABARE was eventually killed off, but the use of joke economic models has continued. Too useful not to continue to be used.
On this day, 6th August 1992, at what turned out to be the death of the “Ecologically Sustainable Development” process, there was… a mass walk out.
The ESD policy process had been set up after the March 1990 federal election, by the returned ALP government as a kind of payment for support to the ‘green movement’. There were working groups, meetings, bold policy proposals (including – gasp a carbon tax) that – inevitably – got watered down. The process really died when Bob Hawke was replaced as Prime Minister by Paul Keating in late 1991, but the momentum carried it on for a few more months. And so
“Finally the National Greenhouse Steering Committee, comprising officials from all levels of government, produced a draft Greenhouse Response Strategy. It was largely oriented towards investigations, exhortations, negotiation and a pious faith in market forces. The report was released for public comment in 1992, but it received little support.
“A two-day forum to discuss the report became a fiasco. First, even the environmental groups which had co-operated totally in the ESD process – the World-wide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation – denounced the forum and refused to participate. Then those who did attend, from industry, farming, the union movement and community groups, attacked the report. They said that they had worked hard in the ESD groups to negotiate workable agreements, combining environmental responsibility with conditions to promote economic development, only to have the agreements altered by faceless bureaucrats. The officials had planned to divide the forum into small working groups, but the participants refused to go until their concerns were discussed. There was no basis for moving into small groups to discuss details, as the whole approach was unacceptable.
“At five o’clock, after a day of battering, the shell-shocked officials announced that the planned second day was cancelled. The level of discontent is illustrated by the fact that the conservative Institution of Engineers, Australia (IEA) issued a press release condemning the report. The IEA were concerned that the bureaucrats had altered the conclusions of the ESD groups, giving the impression that the small groups of officials had decided that they knew better than the rest of the community.”
Lowe, I. (1994) The greenhouse effect and the politics of long-term issues. In (eds) Stephen Bell and Brian Head, State, Economy and Public Policy in Australia. Oxford: Oxford University Press., p321-2.
“… submissions went to committees of state and federal public servants; these committees weakened or even omitted many of the original recommendations and no action plans or timelines were determined. By this stage, conservation groups were so outraged at the gutting of the working groups’ recommendations that they boycotted the process. Even non- conservation groups were angered by the public servants’ actions. These bureaucrats were so attacked by industry, farmers, engineers and unions at a two-day conference in late 1992 that the second day was called off. Several of the conservation representatives on the working groups later related that they often found industry representatives, despite their vested interests, easier to work with than the bureaucrats. In a phenomenon seen many times in environmental disputes, bureaucrats in industry facilitation departments were even more committed to cutting corners on the environment to ensure short-term industry profitability than were the industries themselves.”
See also
Chamberlin, P. 1992. Greens boycott strategy talks. Sydney Morning Herald, 7 August, p. 3.
On this day the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was 354.99 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
It is good to remember that the state is an actor in this, or rather, state administrators have a role…Environmentalist trying to protect rainforests and other kinds of forest had grokked this some time previously of course!
What happened next?
The “National Greenhouse Response Strategy” was launched in December 1992. And instantly forgotten.
