On this day, August 5 1997 Australian Democrat Senator Kernot called for the Federal Government to
“suspend use of the dubious ABARE greenhouse models until the completion of a full Ombudsman’s investigation.”
(Duncan, 1997:75)
The context is this – the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics had spent the previous seven years producing dubious “reports” based on a ludicrous economic model called MEGABARE which always magically proved that any attempt to tax carbon dioxide/coal would be cataclysmic.
The development of the MEGABARE “model” was paid for by oil, gas and coal companies. Of course it was. [See August 7th post on this site…]
And the Minister would trot these numbers out, it would get reported by journalists and become received wisdom.
AND THIS HAPPENED UNDER KEATING BEFORE IT HAPPENED UNDER HOWARD.
Sorry for shouting, but the catastrophe that has been Australian climate and energy policy has been bipartisan. Labor has a faction that doesn’t want to cook the planet, that’s all.
On this day the PPM was 362.4. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
Ah, official reports, with their big sounding numbers. Gramsci. Hegemony. Weaponised Common Sense. Et cetera. Et Cetera.
What happened next?
The Ombudsman’s report (forced to happen by Australian Conservation Foundation action) came out in January 1998. You can read it here.
.ABARE’s numbers kept getting used by the Howard government. Too useful not to.
There’s great stuff about this in Clive Hamilton’s two books – “Running from the Storm” and “Scorcher” and also in Guy Pearse’s “High and Dry.”
On this day, August 4, 2008, the forces of law and order provided law. And order. Forcefully.
At the Third Climate Camp
“Police used pepper spray on the crowd at the Climate Camp 2008. It was around 6am Monday 4th August and campers had been woken to the alarm of ‘cops on site’. They were trying to seize vehicles that campers had parked at a top gate of the camp. It was denied later the same day by Sir Ian Blair that any pepper spray would have been used, but this footage clearly shows its unnecessary use.
This was the same Climate Camp where the Met put it about that police had suffered injuries and been hospitalised. A Labour Minister said 70 police had been injured.
The right wing media picked this up (of course) and ran stories about crazed violent eco-anarchists.
But guess what, it turned out that NONE OF THIS WAS TRUE.
The Liberal Democrats put in a Freedom of Information Act request. The answer
“showed that no officers in the £5.9m police operation at Kingsnorth power station in Kent during August had been injured by protesters. Instead, police records showed that their medical unit had dealt mostly with toothache, diarrhoea, cut fingers and “possible bee stings”.
Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, told MPs at Commons question time yesterday [December 15]: “I was informed that 70 police officers were hurt and naturally assumed that they had been hurt in direct contact as a result of the protest. That clearly wasn’t the case and I apologise if that caused anybody to be misled.”
On this day the PPM was 384.32 ppm. As of August 2021 it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
The media love a good beat-up. And most are in a symbiotic relationship with our lords and masters.
What happened next?
Climate Camp imploded (it wasn’t just down to the undercover cops, btw). Various groups kept the NVDA flame alive. Extinction Rebellion came along in 2018 and learnt absolutely nothing from the history. Nothing. Nada. Nowt.
On this day, 3 August 1970, the first report of the Council on Environmental Quality was delivered to Preside Nixon. It contained a chapter on inadvertent weather modification, carbon dioxide build-up and icecaps melting.
The CEQ had been set up as part of the legislative process that had gathered momentum under Johnson and come to fruition by late 1969.
By early 1970s, folks were going “you know, this really might become a problem.” By the mid-late 1970s the smarter ones dropped the “might”…
What happened next?
The CEQ didn’t return to the climate issue until Carter, best I can tell. And then Gus Speth, as its boss, got cracking with getting things moving, having been nudged by Gordon MacDonald and Rafe Pomerance of Friends of the Earth.
Gordon MacDonald had already been writing about this stuff (see his chapter in the Nigel Calder book). He would go on to be important in the fight against synfuels.
On this day, August 2nd in 1994, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating was on ABC Radio and
“chastised environmentalists for their attention to the “amorphous issue of greenhouse” and suggested they instead celebrate their previous victories on forestry conservation.”
(Mildenberger, 2015: 317-318) ABC National News Interview, 2 August, cited in Taplin, R. (1994). Greenhouse: an overview of Australian policy and practice. Australian Journal of Environmental Management 1(3): 142-155.
The context was this – Keating, as Treasurer, had already stopped Graham Richardson from introducing a 20% reduction target [see July 25th blog post], watered down the next pledge, and gotten the Industry Commission to investigate the economics of climate (in order to squash the issue). When he took over as Prime Minister in December 1991 the “Ecologically Sustainable Development” process was killed off (see blog post on this site on 6th August). He had then conspicuously absented himself from the June 1992 Earth Summit (the only OECD leader not to attend.)
Why this matters
Our leaders have, mostly, not got it, not cared.
What happened next
Keating’s Environment Minister, John Faulkner, tried to get a carbon tax through Cabinet, but did not succeed. The emissions kept climbing. The atmospheric concentrations kept climbing.
On this day, 1st August 2015, the World Coal Association tried once again to distract people from coal’s civilisation and eco-system destroying nature. That’s (part of) its job, that’s what member companies expect in return for their subscription.
The World Coal Association (WCA) called on the World Bank to recognize the vital role of coal in bringing electricity to people in developing and emerging economies
Anon, 2015. WCA Calls on World Bank to Recognize Coal’s Critical Role. Engineering & Mining Journal, Volume 216; Issue 8, 26 1 August.
This has been going on for decades, of course. Smear competing technologies (nuclear, renewables), say you’re indispensable etc.
My personal favourite of the genre is Peabody’s brazen “Advanced Energy for Life” effort from the previous year. They must have been delighted when Australian wrecking ball turned Prime Minister Tony Abbott had parrotted that line (saying “coal is good for humanity”) when opening a (what else) coal mine later that year.
This, from the Australia Institute in 2014, is useful
“Ahead of the G-20 meeting in Australia later this week, a new report by an Australian think-tank convincingly punctures coal industry claims that coal is an essential part of the solution to lack of access to electricity in the developing world.
Zeroing in on Peabody Energy’s “Advanced Energy for Life” global public relations campaign, which contends coal-fired power is a cheap, effective way to provide power to the large impoverished areas of India, Pakistan and elsewhere that now have none, the new study by the Australia Institute states that, “Peabody’s only contribution to energy poverty is maintaining a website and social media page which promotes coal as the solution to the problem…. Despite extensive searches and contact with companies and mining lobby groups, we could not find a single example where coal companies have supported coal-powered energy poverty alleviation projects.”
Meanwhile, billions of people need reliable cheap electricity, and if we had got on with developing decent sources of renewables, with storage, instead of allowing our “best minds” to make missiles, surveillance and marketing algorithms and assorted nonsense, we’d probably be a lot closer to that. Oh well.
As per this website, on this day the atmospheric CO2 ppm was 399.11
“carbon dioxide and climate, the greenhouse effect:” hearing before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources, Agriculture Research, and Environment and the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, first session, July 31, 1981.
Here’s who was there. By now you probably recognise Roger Revelle and Stephen Schneider….
You have to wonder what they were thinking/hoping, given the wrecking ball that was the Reagan Administration. But, then, what else were they supposed to do?
Though few people other than Rafe Pomerance seemed to have noticed amid Reagan’s environmental blitzkrieg, another hearing on the greenhouse effect was held several weeks earlier, on July 31, 1981. It was led by Representative James Scheuer, a New York Democrat — who lived at sea level on the Rockaway Peninsula, in a neighborhood no more than four blocks wide, sandwiched between two beaches — and a canny, 33-year-old congressman named Albert Gore Jr….
The Revelle hearing went as [Gore’s fixer] Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.” That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.
On this day 30 July 1979 Committee on Governmental Affairs one day symposium on c02 build up, synfuels and energy policy, chaired by Senator Abraham Ribicoff –
A group of scientists, warning of potential ecological imbalances and climatic changes, yesterday urged the government to slow its pursuit of a large-scale synthetic fuels program.
The scientists said the ecological changes could result from higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — one assured by-product of a switch to synfuel production.
They described the so-called “greenhouse effect” whereby heat is trapped close to the earth by increased levels of carbon dioxide, and predicted some long-term effects might be erratic world food production, severe droughts in some regions and costal flooding in others
We need to remember that some so-called solutions can make things worse – wicked problems and all that.
What happened next?
Synfuels were killed off by the Reagan Administration (not because they care about, or even knew about the scientific critique, but because they didn’t fit the narrative etc).
On this day, July 30 1989 Conservative Politician Sir Ian Lloyd was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying ‘we have, at the most, a quarter of a century to make the assessments and take action. The life of the planet may be at stake.’
Wikipedia has him saying “civilisation is clinging by our fingernails to the cliff”.
for which academic (and other) researches owe him a debt of gratitude.
Lloyd was a prescient guy who, well, later started wittering on about pyramids of uncertainty, and Bjorn Lomborg. It happens. It’s sad when it does, but it happens. See obituary here.
Why this matters.
Did the rhetoric help us resist our own death grip? No, it didn’t. It never does.
On this day, July 29 1974 a World Meteorological Organisation conference on climate modelling began, running until 10 August.
As Bert Bolin (one of THE key figures) wrote in the foreword-
At the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in June 1972, it was emphasized that the earth’s climate is of basic importance to man and his well-being. Climatic variability and possible change are still essentially unpredictable although they are significant factors in the continued development of both industrialized and developing countries. Some of the most important problems that confront us were very well summarized in the SMIC report “Study of Man’s Impact on Climate”, (1) which was available at the UN conference and served as an important reference document. In recommendation 79d of the conference, it was recommended that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in co-operation with the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) “continue to carry out the GARP (Global Atmospheric Research Programme) to better understand the general circulation of the atmosphere, the causes of climatic change and whether these causes are natural or the result of man’s activities”.
At its eighth session in London in March 1973, the JOC considered in detail the role of GARP for studies of climate and its fluctuations. It was proposed that the next step towards an active programme would be the organization of an International Study Conference on the Physical Basis of Climate and Climate Modelling….
The conference was held at Wijk outside Stockholm during the period 29 July to 10 August 1974 with a total attendance of about 70 scientists from different parts of the world. Their devoted work during two weeks has resulted in the present report.
These were the building blocks – between 1970 and 1975 – when climate scientists patiently assembled the evidence, debated, refined. By about 1976/7 it was pretty clear what was coming, just a question of when (how fast, in what order). They did try to warn the politicians. And some of the politicians kinda sorta listened a bit.
What happened next?
The scientists kept at it. (Impact) Science is very very cool.. Some joined the dots, understood the implications, quicker than others. By 1979 the smarter ones were getting quite nervous….
WMO started already in the 1970’s to concentrate more than before on climate problems. An Executive Committee panel on Climate Change was established in 1975, with Dr. Bill Gibbs from Australia as Chairman, and CCL, under the chairmanship of Helmut Landsberg, from 1973, re-oriented its effort towards environmental problems related to climate. About the same time, in 1974, the Global Atmospheric Research Program had a meeting in Stockholm in order to agree on which problems related to climate that should be of main interest to this program in the next few years. In fact the meeting discussed the fundamental question to change the classical approach to climate studies from the statistical one towards a more physically-oriented one. In fact in the Stockholm Conference on the Physics of Climate in 1974, the numerical forecasting modelers who had worked for about ten years or more on modeling the general circulation of the atmosphere were now interested in trying to apply similar mathematical approaches to the global circulation of the atmosphere and to other aspects of understanding of the future climate. It would then be possible to clarify what could be expected to happen on the globe, if the increase of the carbon dioxide from human emissions from burning fossil fuel would continue without change. The Global Atmospheric Research Program, when it had been accepted by the U.N. in 1962, included a proposal for a program divided into two parts: one on the experiment to improve the weather forecasting on the basis of increased observations around the globe. This experiment, proposed for about ten years by Bo Doos in WMO, had in 1974, reached a stage where it could be expected to take place within the next five years. For that reason, Dr. Bert Bolin, who was in charge of the Global Atmospheric Research Program, thought that it was timely to start with the second part of the GARP program, namely the climate part. This was the basic reason why the Conference in Stockholm in 1974 was called and the physical foundations of climate were established.
On this day, July 28 1970 “[Journalist Claire] Sterling began an article in the Washington Post with an air of crisis, reporting breathlessly prior to the Stockholm meeting:
“Scientists still aren’t sure how much carbon dioxide we can inject into the atmosphere before heating it up enough to melt the polar icecaps, how much smog can cut off the sun’s rays without bringing a new Ice Age upon us, how many germs per cubic centimetre of water we can swallow and live, how much better or worse off the human race would actually be for using or banning DDT.”
Sterling, C. 1970. The UN and World Pollution, Washington Post, Times Herald, 28 July
.
I found this quote on page 200 of a rather excellent book called “Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism” by Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Why this matters.
Yes. 1970.
What happened next?
The 1972 Stockholm Conference did less than it might have for climate science, but the scientists kept going.
Sterling wrote a totally beserk book called “The Real Terror Network”, which influenced the senile Ronald Reagan and the professional paranoids around him –
As per Wikipedia
“The book was read and appreciated by Alexander Haig and William Casey, but its arguments were dismissed by the CIA’s Soviet analysts; Lincoln Gordon, one of three members of a senior review panel at the CIA charged, at Casey’s request, with bringing non-intelligence professional and academic review to the agency, discovered comparing CIA intelligence reports and the book that at least some of Sterling’s claims had come from stories that the CIA itself had planted in the Italian press.”
