What I think we can learn from this is that by the late 1960s, people in the know were beginning to take note…
What happened nextThe issue was ‘there’ in the lead up to Stockholm, but there was not the hard evidence yet. By the late 1970s, it was obvious to anyone with intellectual integrity that there was a serious problem ahead (but ‘ahead’ might mean another thirty years).
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 question is this. Who is the bigger climate criminal – John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia 1996-2007, or Anthony Albanese, same gig from 2022 to ??. It’s not as straightforward as you think.
My answer is below. It’s not clear cut, and I am keen to hear your arguments. In the tweets/replies/comments, etc. Suggested hashtag #HowardOrAlbo
For those to young to remember, and those who have done their best to repress the horror: John Howard did enormous damage to Australia, across a wide range of issues. For these purposes, I’ll stick to climate.
A one paragraph history lesson.
After the shock of the Liberals going to the 1990 Federal election with a stronger emissions reduction target than the ALP, the opponents of meaningful Australian climate action had successfully mobilised in the early 1990s. They prevented any ambitious contribution by Australia to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. They gutted the Ecologically Sustainable Development process initiated by Bob Hawke, Labor Prime Minister from 1983-1991. They stopped any effective action going into the National Greenhouse Response Strategy (December 1992). In all this they were helped by Labor’s Paul Keating, who rolled Hawke in late 1991. In 1994-5 the opponents of climate action, co-ordinated by the Business Council of Australia and what we now know as the Minerals Council of Australia. They laid the groundwork for Australia to plead for “special treatment” internationally, using farcical economic modelling.
Then John Howard came and dialled it all up not to eleven, but to twelve. He doubled down on the economic modelling, which was all horseshit, literally funded by the oil coal and gas companies. He made promises about renewables in order to buy off the worried Liberals, promises he then did everything to avoid keeping. He arm-twisted and bullshitted his way to an incredibly generous deal at Kyoto (and then pulled out, once his mate George W. Bush had led the way). He did everything he could to slow renewables, including organising a meeting of fossil fuel company CEOs to demand their help (I am not making this up). He twice killed off an Emissions Trading Scheme, the second time – in 2003 – against his united cabinet. On and on and on I could go.
Anthony Albanese is worse.
If we can only send one Prime Minister to the International Court of Justice at the Hague it should be loveable raised-in-social-housing Albo.
Here’s my reasoning.
John Howard has two (weak-ish to laughable) arguments in, ah, “mitigation.”
First – he was born in 1939. He was raised to believe that there were no limits to the Earth’s bounty, and that if there WERE limits, well, technology would fix them (1) . He was 30 when the whole eco-doom thing started, and could say “this is a yoof fad”, even while his party, the Liberal Party, created a Minister for the Environment for the first time. I wrote about this in an academic article called “Wind beneath their contempt: Why Australian policymakers oppose solar and wind energy”(Hudson, 2017). There’s a Conversation article about it here.
Second – in the 1990s, even after the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1995-6 it was possible – if you really really engaged in a lot of motivated reasoning – to believe that climate change was mostly a greenie scare designed to create a dreaded Superstate of regulation. The commies had lost the Cold War and were starting a war about Heat to have another go.
It was nonsense, of course it was, but we all believe nonsensical things, occasionally. And so what if some temperature records were falling? Australia is a land of extremes… Dorothea McKellar yadda yadda yadda. Yes, there’s a Millennium Drought (pray for rain, said Howard, in April 2007), but Australia has always had droughts. Howard could grasp some flimsy bullshit climate “doubt.” It had no substance, but it was there.
Finally, in his defence, too at least Howard never pretended to give a rat’s arse. At least he had enough respect to be open in his contempt for the black armbands, the green armbands etc.
Albo has none of that.
Albo was born in 1963. He was 9 when The Limits to Growth came out. Questions of environmental damage and danger were just there for him growing up. He was 20 when the Franklin Dam was saved by his beloved Labor Party. He was 25 when Bob Hawke came over all “green,” when Australia was freaking out about the hole in the Ozone and the Greenhouse Effect.
Albo? How many impossible bushfires? How many killer heatwaves and temperature records smashed? How many incinerated animals? A billion? Two? Are you waiting till the number gets to 5 billion, Albo?
What are you planning as your excuse, in ten years, Albo? I’d really like to know. Oh and, btw, that sound you hear? It’s your old boss, Tom Uren, spinning in his grave.
Whatever your excuse is, it won’t fool anyone. Except maybe you? And maybe in the Alboverse that’s all that matters. Top “leadership”, mate.
Meanwhile, Albo has told us how much he cares. Albo has been making a song and dance about how much he cares for two decades.
The Senate Inquiry into the Energy White Paper has concluded the Energy White Paper will delay critical action on climate change for another twenty years [All Our Yesterdays post here]
And the ALP is forever telling the Greens they are irresponsible (2). Because Labor has suuuuch a good record of following through.
On that subject, a quick digression about one of Albo’s enablers.
Health Minister Mark “The Climate Wars” Butler, sat there like a Trappist monk, watching Albo shit over the portfolio that was his “passion”. Mate your silence is heard. People remember your book, all the lovely words. People hear it and draw conclusions about the quantity and the quality of your sincerity and your courage. You think anyone will be impressed when you mumble something about Caucus rules and Party loyalty? How about some loyalty to the community you claim to represent? The city you are supposed to speak for? How about, I don’t know, even some species loyalty? Mene mene tekel upharsin, eh?
So Howard IS a climate criminal. He should be sitting in the dock by the North Sea. But Albo belongs alongside him, and I think in front of him. Albo has no excuses. Not the excuse of outlook, not knowledge. Albo is the guy in the Kudelka cartoon from last weekend.
Basically, this. As per Richard Denniss’s quotetweet
Australia has relied on rorting rules rather than cutting carbon emissions for decades…
Carbon offsets, carbon capture & storage, clean coal…& now nuclear…any magical future solution can be used to justify subsidising fossil fuel expansion in the present
Yep. This is bipartisan. But the chickens are coming home to roost (or are they among the incinerated billions of animals?) And Australia’s “ambition” is utterly inadequate, as per Bill Hare’s May 2024 Conversation article and Carbon ActionTracker work.
[Btw, the disclaimer at the bottom, in reference to Royce Kurmelovs, applies equally to Dennis and Hare.]
But before you go out and save the world, inquiring minds would like to know – in your opinion – Albo or John Howard? Who is the bigger climate criminal?
Further reading
I have focussed on two “personalities.” There is always the danger of a morality tale, ignoring the awesome power of the networks of determined, clever and remorseless individuals and groups that have played and won the game called “capture the state.” The reading below (especially the Royce Kurmelovs’ book, to be spoken of in the same breath as Guy Pearse’s work) should help with that.
Even Tony Abbott , born 1957, kinda sorta has that excuse (though he and his best mate Malcolm Turnbull are the same age)
I am not now, and never have been a member of the Green Party of anywhere. Or any political party. And as for the Greens, I am not always a fan of how they do bread and butter politics. Here and here. And here, I guess.
DISCLAIMER
I helped Royce with bits of research and we continue to collaborate. For clarity, he had no foreknowledge of this article, nothing to do with it. Same goes for two other ppl whose work I drew on – Richard Dennis’s and Bill Hare. Didn’t consult them in this, no idea if they will applaud or be horrified. My views alone.
Two hundred years ago, on this day, October 21st, 1824, Joseph Aspdin got a patent…
By 1817, he had set up in business on his own in central Leeds. He must have experimented with cement manufacture during the next few years, because on 21 October 1824 he was granted the British Patent BP 5022 entitled An Improvement in the Mode of Producing an Artificial Stone, in which he coined the term “Portland cement” by analogy with the Portland stone,[3] an oolitic limestone that is quarried on the channel coast of England, on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. See below for the text of the patent. [Wikipedia]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 270ishppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Industrial Revolution (not called that at the time!) was in full swing, all sorts of wondrous chemical and physics innovations were happening. often led by empiricists, rather than theoreticians because we didn’t even have an atomic theory of matter at that point, or not one that we liked.
Why this matters is that cement has an astonishing carbon footprint. 8% of global emissions? I haven’t had time to track down a source better than CBS. But ballpark,that seems right-ish] And we’re not going to be net zero if we’re still making lots of things out of steel and cement using current techniques. Whether you can muck around with the clinker or you need CCS, who knows? We’ll find out. My money is that climate change will continue to be an unmitigated disaster.
What happened next we went head over heels in love with cement.
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.
A report on the conference ‘Climate and Offshore Energy Resources’, Royal Society, 21–23 October 1980
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 339ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the First World Climate Conference had happened in Geneva the previous year, but Bolin was still trying to shepherd stuff around CO2 build up through the scientific collaboration systems, with help from Mustafa Tolba. Bolin of course had been banging on about climate change and CO2 buildup since 1958. And Bolin had been at a 1969 conference at the Royal Society and here he was 10 years later.
What we learn is that we knew, and that Bolin did his best.
What happened next. It was another 8 years before elite politicians had to start paying lip service to “the greenhouse effect.”
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 308ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius had been dead for four years buthis ideas about CO2 as something building up in the atmosphere that would cause warming was still around. And every so often a newspaper will pick up on it. We’ve had several other examples of that already on All Our Yesterdays for example, here and here, [New York Times and The Oregonian].
What we learn is that good ideas go through rough patches. Bad Ideas can go through noisy patches. Do we get closer approximations of reality? Yeah, I think we do. We split the atom goddamnit. Go us, brainy murder apes!
What happened next It would be another 20 years before Gilbert Plass would make his statements at the American Geophysical Union meeting…
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.
Twenty three years ago, on this day, October 20th, 2001, four years to the day after they’d tried to give him solar panels, Greenpeace nailed John Howard.
Greenpeace noted in an October 20 [2001] media release, “In its ongoing attempt to avoid an agreement that has any legal consequences, Australia has tried to weaken the whole Protocol by substituting the word ‘should’ for the world ‘shall’ throughout the compliance agreement, weakening its legal power. [Compare Paris panic in 2015] Australia also wants to be able [to] play with its figures on forestry and land use, and is trying to get the rules written so it doesn’t even have to say exactly where the forests are.”
Jennifer Morgan from the World Wildlife Fund described Australia as the “leader of the backtrack camp”. The Climate Action Network awarded Australia a “Fossil of the Day” award for trying to gut the compliance regime.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 371ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that here we were, a month after 911 and a month before the next Federal Election. John Howard was still being a prick on climate. Of course he was. He was breathing. He had defeated an emissions trading scheme. He had slowed down renewable energy as much as he could. And he’d already kind of promised that he wasn’t going to ratify Kyoto, (though he didn’t make that announcement until June of the following year.)
What we learn is that Greenpeace has been telling the truth to Howard and all of these politicians but you shall know the truth and the truth really shall not set you free. Anyone who tells you that the truth will set you free is either a god-bother, a helpless liberal or hasn’t been paying any attention.
What happened next? Howard won another two elections (2001 and 2004), caused more mayhem and despondency. And the emissions kept climbing. And the coal exports. And the LNG. And the profits accruing to a few companies. And here we are.
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.
You may have read a bit about Carbon Capture and Storage recently. CCS is (still) being used as a way to avoid asking really hard questions about our future as a species (that is not hyperbole). A thread.
1/13
200 yrs ago, in 1824, a French scientist, Fourier, proved that SOMETHING in the atmosphere was trapping some heat from the Sun. If not, the planet would be much much colder. 30 yrs later Eunice Foote and John Tyndall showed carbon dioxide (C02) was a ‘greenhouse gas’.
The basic problem is when humans burn oil, coal and gas (“fossil fuels”) for energy, heat, making stuff, carbon dioxide is released as a by-product. Levels of C02 in the atmosphere have gone from 280ppm 200 yrs ago to 422 today. And climbing. Heat is trapped.
CCS is supposed to stop some of the C02 getting into the atmosphere. But even if (and it is a HUGE IF) it worked perfectly, at scale, it would be merely slowing down the increase of C02 in the atmosphere. Again, C02 traps heat. Too much heat is Really Bad.
4/13
CCS as a set of technologies is simultaneously old and new (as I call it here – Schrodinger’s Cat of a technology.
In the UK, there was brief interest in CCS in the late 1980s, but it really only kicked up in early 2000s.
More funding and another competition followed. In November 2015 George Osborne, then Treasurer, dismissively kneecapped it. Industry was furious. No, FUCKING FURIOUS. It looked like CCS might be dead. Then came the Kipling Manoeuvre….
8/13
From 2018 to now, there has been rhetorical support for CCS. And endless consultations and dribs and drabs of (big) money. But the future is not clear.
9/13
My guesstimate fwiw is
a) some projects will be begun
b) there will be fierce opposition from some locals and NGOs
c) There will be very entrenched positions
d) The winner will be … ???
10/13
This matters because we have
a) Limited money
b) Policy bandwidth and
c) Even less time (actually, net zero time)
To sort all this out.
11/13
I will be trying to point out the gaps and silences in the positions of pro and anti-CCS types.
(My position – defo a case for industrial ccS, but oil & gas sector will use that as figleaf).
Thirteen years ago, on this day, October 19th, 2011,
On 19th October, 2011, the Government terminated negotiations with the ScottishPower consortium as the Government considered it could not agree a deal that would represent value for money (NAO, 2012). The first CCS competition ended without any winner.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 392ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that BP had been interested in using CCS on one of its projects in 2005. proposed it. They pulled the plug in 2007, because Treasury wouldn’t comply. Then a CCS competition had been established in November 2007, Gordon Brown launched it at a WWF event. And the idea was it would be up and running within a couple of years. Ha ha. The competition dragged on and dragged on and dragged on, eventually whittled down to only one interested company. And they’d only been doing it because they were going to be given loads of money to keep the stranded assets afloat. And even then, that didn’t come off. But a second competition was already waiting in the wings.
What we learn is that CCS has a long, long history of failure in the UK, of broken promises of delayed and then ended schemes. Hopefully by now I can point to my book?
What happened next was that a second competition was set up as was the UKCCS Research Centre, some money for workshops and networking and so forth. And then the competition came undone in November 2015… And then, well, you should buy my book!!
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.
Alvin Weinberg, ‘Global Effects of Man’s Production of Energy’, Science 186 (18 October 1974), 205. Weinberg wrote that the world might reach ‘climatological limits’ within 30–50 years. Noting the uncertainty surrounding the results so far, he called for two responses. ‘First, climatologists should recognize the profound implications of this question and do the basic research in global modelling … so that, say 20 years from now, we can base our energy policy on a much sounder understanding of this limit than we now possess’; and, second, since the ‘problem of global effects of energy production, like….’
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 330ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the United Nations Environment Programme had been going for a couple of years, since the Stockholm conference. Science had been publishing articles, Weinberg had been paying attention. The modelling conference had just finished in Sweden. Weinberg as a big fan of nuclear thought that this was another selling point for nuclear – that its carbon emissions were so much lower.
What we learn why it matters is that the pro nuclear gloss on climate mitigation has been around for a long time. Weinberg was a serious player.
What happened next? Well, in 1979, Weinberg visited Australia and gave a speech which got reported in the Canberra Times and so forth. It explicitly mentioned nuclear as a climate solution. And again, that puts into context; what I thought was unusual in 1981 of the various Liberal and Country Party Senators talking about it was not that big a deal. People knew by the early 1980s, people knew who were paying any real attention.
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 long-anticipated shift from “climate change is a leftie anti-progress hoax” to “it’s too late to do anything except geo-engineer the planet” is underway.
Speaking on the far-right television programme GB News on Wednesday 16th October s, former Conservative minister Jacob Rees-Mogg on Wednesday 16th October said the following
“When it comes to climate change, most of the public discourse surrounds hair shirt measures to cut emissions and phase out fossil fuels. But is this really where our focus ought to be?
“Perhaps, instead of being obsessed by futile attempts to stop climate change, a goal that’s looking increasingly out of reach, we should turn our attention to the virtues of green technologies and innovative developments to tackle some of the most practical and immediate challenges.”
[continues ad nauseam]
For once failing to meet the award-winning standards for fierce scrutiny, historical awareness and political balance for which GN News is globally respected [yes, that is SARCASM] the journalist in question failed to ask Rees-Mogg the following questions
a) Had he ever peddled climate skepticism (e.g. in a 2013 opinion piece in the Telegraph), despite his political hero Margaret Thatcher having made several ‘time to save the world’ speeches in 1988-1990
b) Had he tried to stop his mate Michael Gove in an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to remove climate change from the National Curriculum.
c) Had he ever tried to stop his former boss, Prime Minister David Cameron from “cutting the green crap” like house insulation, greener transport etc, that would have led to lower bills (and probably lower emissions)
d) Is this not simply a classic ‘reverse-ferret’ – changing position so quickly that everyone will be too busy feeling their head spin to ask obvious questions about intelligence, integrity and the rest of it (that nobody expects from politicians anymore anyway).
The answers are, of course. Yes, no., no, and yes.
This switch from “not happening” to “too late to do anything” is time-honoured, and across many issues. See this 1986 clip from the classic BBC sitcom Yes Prime Minister. “The standard Foreign Office four stage procedure”
It’s been happening around climate, intermittently, since the late 2000s.
