Eighteen years ago, on this day, March 13th, 2007,
Australia’s coal and power generation industries must shoulder a large part of the cost of developing clean coal technologies, investing ”billions not millions” to mitigate climate change, ACTU secretary Greg Combet says. ”We are talking about companies that make multibillion-dollar profits from coal mining. It is only fair that a slice of those profits be directed to the research and development needed to substantially reduce greenhouse emissions,” he said. Speaking from the Hunter Valley, where he was launching a clean coal discussion paper with Opposition environment spokesman Peter Garrett, Mr Combet called for the Federal Government’s Minimum Renewable Energy Target for green electricity generation to be boosted.
Beeby, R. 2007. Put power profits into clean energy: Combet. Canberra Times, 13 March.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the ALP, in opposition federally, was using climate as a big stick to beat Prime Minister John Howard with. It had the added advantage of squaring the circle of their support for coal miners and coal mining; they needed something like geosequestration, CCS. So here we have Greg Combet, who would end up as Gillard’s Environment Minister, but that’s for the future, spouting guff about “the industry has to do X or Y,” and this is the classic triangulating position of seeming to be a friend of the worker and chiding industry bosses. It’s all nice theater.
What I think we can learn from this that CCS is an extremely useful way of squaring various circles.
But I think we’re now entering the world of nobody really bothering to pretend. We’re into the unmitigated disaster phase of it all.
What happened next Rudd bunged 100 million of Australian taxpayers dollars at a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Initiative. So, money well spent.
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.
Last Tuesday and Wednesday the Royal Courts of Justice heard an appeal in a case about whether the Government broke the law in approving a power-station-with-carbon-capture-and-storage project. The heart of the matter is the amount of emissions that will still be released. The appeal has been brought by environmental consultant Dr Andrew Boswell. Here he talks to AOY. The transcript has been very lightly edited for clarity. Next week, a detailed account of the numbers behind the appeal.
And so first question is, for people who are not familiar with yourself, your life in a couple of 100 words
Andrew Boswell 0:49
My life in a couple of hundred words? Well, currently, what I’ve been doing the last few years is challenging government decisions on projects which have an impact on the climate change, basically when they have a significant impact. Whether, basically whether the government is making a decision to approve these projects in a lawful way. So it’s largely looking at things like Environmental Impact Assessments and whether they are actually working out right, secondly, then whether they they [the government of the day] make a decision which is right with the law,
marc hudson 1:34
And why did you decide that this was a good use of your time and expertise, as opposed to other forms of environmental activism that in theory, you could be doing?
Andrew Boswell 1:47
Yeah, well, I saw a particular niche for myself, both as a scientist, so I could sort of review environmental impact assessments on the technical side, but also a realisation that the legal system wasn’t actually securing the Climate Change Act [of 2008] and our climate targets. I mean, I personally think we need much more radical carbon budgets and targets along the lines of Kevin Anderson might say; reductions of several percent a year, lots of percent a year, to meet the temperature targets. But we’re stuck with what we have under the Climate Change Act. And what we have is that not even those targets are being secured in planning decisions and by the planning system and by the legal system. So I set out to really sort of highlight that,
marc hudson 2:46
And we’ll talk briefly in general terms about the case that was being heard yesterday and today. But could you give us an example of a case where you forced the government to obey the laws, which, ironically, you know, it should be doing under the 2008 Climate Act.
Andrew Boswell 3:07
Well, the case today is a case in point. We don’t know the outcome of it, But my work is not just going into the courts, it’s actually going through the whole planning examination. And what did happen in that case is that initially the upstream emissions from the natural gas, which is largely methane emissions, were not initially put into the environmental impact assessment. So they [BP and Equinor] weren’t even trying to declare them. Then what happened was they did declare them, because I called that out in the planning examination. But then they actually went and miscalculated the whole thing. And what they did was they double-counted the carbon capture emissions. So effectively, they sort of said, “Oh, the carbon capture emissions, 180% of the carbon which would be going up the smoke stack” rather than 90% which is what they’re saying they capture. They effectively calculated 180% which then they were able to hide the methane emissions under.
So there’s a lot of deception going on. And over the course of six months, exchange of letters with the department and the government, eventually the government agreed with me that they had double counted. It’s notable to say that BP and Equinor when they had the facts laid out very simply before then, still denied that’s what they were doing.
Just to elaborate on that, do you understand that it actually took me three days to find the double-counting error because it was distributed around about half a dozen documents. And I actually had to create spreadsheets to understand what all the spreadsheets and the documents were doing; how the numbers interrelated. When I found the double-counting error, I thought, “no, they can’t really be doing that.” But eventually I convinced myself they were. And then I managed to lay it out in one half page spreadsheet, which actually went into the decision letter with the Secretary of State. And the Secretary of State, saying yes, they agreed with me that there was a double- counting error, but there was a long road to get to that simple explanation.
But even when I laid that out in front of BP and Equinor they still went on denying to the government that they ever made a double-counting error
marc hudson 5:51
On a recent Zoom call… I saw you lay out some of the details of this case. And you also said something that I think was very interesting and important that I would like you to expand on, which is that… you saw a case for CCS, for some purposes, eg, some industrial processes, cement, as opposed to what we’re getting, which is the energy production.
And I suppose my question is, how are we going to get or how could we get the CCS infrastructure and the CCS expertise and the CCS business models for the capture of emissions from, say, cement and ceramics and some chemical processes without the big oil companies having been able to develop it for power generation. Is that even possible, do you think that?
Andrew Boswell 7:12
Yeah, this is why I said that there is a case that it could be used for cement. But I didn’t say it was a proven case. And I think this is what needs to happen. And part of the problem in the UK is that they tried to do various what you might call stand-alone CCS projects, and those all failed. And one of the reasons they failed was we can’t get to all infrastructure to join up for one project – you can’t justify a storage site. And I get that, and that is a real issue. But then the response to that was, “well, okay, we’ll build this cluster model.” And each cluster basically starts off by having something driven by natural gas. It’s either blue hydrogen or it’s gas fired power, as in the Net Zero Teesside. So what you get is to start the thing up, and that’s the thing which is then going to sort of pump the CO2 down under the sea. You lock into natural gas.
But not only do you lock in, you front load all the emissions in this cluster model, because the big emissions come from the gas-fired power station, the natural gas supply and the methane in supply chain. You lock all those in; your cement plant might come along 10 years later, by which time you’ve done huge damage with the methane emissions in the first place.
So the question – and I think what your question is – is given that, can you now go back to actually a model where you could develop CCS for things like cement and lime, but you don’t rely on this cluster model, and you don’t rely on having a gas-fired power station to pump the stuff under the sea. And that’s why I think the case is not proven. We need to understand whether that can be done or not. And I don’t have a view on that, but I think what I think does need to be solved is the power to pump the stuff under the sea is one thing, and that could be done by renewables. The power for the Net Zero Teesside of it was about 50 megawatts to sort of power the pump pipeline.
But there’s also issues about whether you need a constant sea of supply to the storage site. And there’s a lot of issues about developing that particular storage site actually off Net Zero Teesside, where they’re sort of saying it needs to have a constant supply at a certain rate. I think that’s when you start to hit problems, which have tried to overcome with the cluster model. But by trying to do that, they then really hit the greenhouse gas problem. So,
marc hudson 10:06
Sorry, when you said the greenhouse gas problem, you mean the volume?,
Andrew Boswell 10:10
Well, the greenhouse gas volume meaning that the emissions, which they can’t capture. Because all the methane emissions in the supply chain are uncatchable. And also the diesel from the shipping, if it’s LNG, and all the rest of it emissions from all that stuff is uncatchable. So it’s not carbon capture at all. There’s lots of emissions going out in the process which are not capturable at all.
marc hudson 10:36
I’m conscious of you wanting to have your meal and so forth. So two more questions. One is, if someone’s listening to this, if the transcript is suitably audible, or they’re reading it, and they think “I want to support Andrew Boswell’s work,” what do they do?
Andrew Boswell 10:54
Well, my work is sort of pro bono as such. I work basically pro bono, a sort of retired person with an interest. There have been times where when the case is coming up, we’ve needed to have financial support or something for the case, through crowd funders. So basically, it’s sort of “look out for things like that” at the moment. But to support my work more widely, in some non-financial way, I would say, just look out for what I’m doing. Because, you know, the campaign against CCS has really taken off.
At this moment, because I just finished a big legal case, I’m not quite sure what happens next. But we’re continuing the campaign to try to stop the government investing in all this.
And on the back of the [February 2025] Public Accounts Committee report, which is worth talking about because it’s highlighted several things. It highlighted that CCS is a very high-risk in trying to achieve net zero. The government it’s saying it’s harder to transition to net zero [without CCS]. The Public Accounts Committee have said that it’s very high risk in doing that. And they’re also saying it’s very high cost. We know the subsidies are now up to 60 billion pounds, the subsidies they’ve allocated to this
marc hudson 12:28
Sorry six billion or sixty billion?
Andrew Boswell 12:32
Sixty, Six zero, yeah, yeah. I can send you over a web page.
It’s all on one page, the DESNZ subsidies. And if you add up the ones which have got CCS in them, they’re already 60 billion, and you haven’t got blue hydrogen in there yet.
So it’s very costly. And the third point was they said, basically, the science isn’t fully determined yet, and there’s new science on the methane and so on. And the government need to take note of that. So we’re sort of coming in on the back of that, whether you know, in the budget or whatever the CCS could be cut in the budget.
marc hudson 13:14
In the seventh carbon budget?
Andrew Boswell 13:16
No, the national Treasury budget – so Rachel Reeve’s spending review in June, and her statement on March 26th leading up to it. There’s talk that she may cut CCS. The talk is that she may put it into the defence budget. I personally think it should be redirected to insulation and genuine green energy, because climate change is our biggest security risk.
And that’s not to underrate what’s happening. We’re going through a sort of process of the whole world order is changing. America is switching sides, and all the rest of it. And I understand we, you know, we have to consider our defence very seriously as well. But I don’t think we should just simply take green budgets and cut them. But where they’re bad, green budgets going for CCS – which isn’t going to help all the reasons in the Public Accounts Committee – we should redirect them to the stuff which will help insulation and genuinely green energy… So renewables and storage solutions…
marc hudson 14:25
Large scale batteries, etc, etc. Final question, anything else you’d like to say? Anything you thought, “Oh, he’s going to ask me this, and here’s my answer,”
Andrew Boswell 14:33
No, I think that’s that’s probably really good. Thank you.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 419ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was artists want to feel Relevant, while still being Artistic.
What I think we can learn from this. Artists, like almost everyone else, have been late and largely empty-handed to the party. Human, all too human.
What happened next. The opera ain’t over, but you can hear the fat lady in the wings, doing her warm ups.
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.
On this day, March 12, 1984, conservative MP for Carshalton Nigel Forman, had this to say…
March 12 1984 – I shall add a word about the more remote problems, which are just as important. Are the Government prepared to take an international initiative of an appropriate kind to limit the use of chlorofluorocarbons, which may deplete the stratospheric ozone? Are the Government prepared to pay more attention to the possible dangers of the “greenhouse effect” on the globe as a consequence of the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Nobody knows about these matters for certain, but one knows for sure that the more investigation that is done in good time, the more we shall be able to minimise any risks that may ensue. Since the greatest contribution to the “greenhouse effect” comes from the burning of fossil fuels, does that not have important implications for our energy policies and those of other countries, since we are not the largest burners of fossil fuels?
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 338ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that in October 1983 the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States had released a report called “Can we delay a greenhouse warming?” (spoiler, no, no we cant). This had received some press coverage in the UK, and publications like Nature and New Scientist were covering the issue too.
What we learn Backbencher politicians were alert to the issue, while those “At The Top” were studiously looking elsewhere…
What happened next
Forman’s intellect and independence clearly got in the way, but eventually, to quote from Wikipedia
“The omission of Nigel Forman, from successive ministerial reshuffles over the past few years has surprised many at Westminster when several apparently less talented politicians have secured top posts. But after 16 years in the Commons, he has become an under-secretary at the education department”[8]
He resigned from that post in late 1992, for reasons never disclosed (someone had a dirt file on him? Who knows) and he lost his seat to a Lib Dem in the 1997 landslide. He died in 2017, having had an academic and consultancy after-life.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 418ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that we’re starting to see, we have been seeing for 20 or 30 years, not just weather events that people thought wouldn’t happen, but that couldn’t happen. In some cases, perhaps many cases, that’s based on our overconfidence in our models and our intellects and our inability to see ramifications at a distance without going or mystic woo- woo New Age.
What I think we can learn from this is that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do about these absurdly complex and I mean complex. Not complicated. I mean complex systems and systems of systems.
But against that backdrop, we do know that if you pour billions and billions of tons of carbon dioxide, accumulating into more than 2 trillion of tons into the atmosphere,in a geological eye blink, there are going to be some interesting consequences.
What happened next Antarctica continues to warm. The planet continues to warm. We seem to be off the leash.
coNTExt – John Mercer article in Nature 1978
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.
This is a (long and probably over-detailed) post about something that we do not pay enough attention to – the Question and Answer session after a presentation by one or more “experts”.
If you care about progress on issues (be it climate change, homelessness, education or – well – anything – I think it’s worth your time to read and chew on. But MRDA – I would say that, because I was both one of the “experts” and also the facilitator of the Q&A.
The basic points are these –
The “normal” way of doing Q&As is accepted without hardly anyone thinking much about them
This normal way is intensely alienating to some people, who vote with their feet and don’t come back.
There are some simple ways (some of which are described in the post) that you can disrupt the normal way and make life less alienating (even, gasp, welcoming) to more people.
The blog goes through what I did on Thursday 30th January 2025 at a “Curiosity Club” event in Glossop, a town in the north of England.
The event seemed to go pretty well. People were engaged, and engaged with each other. Of the nine questions, five came from women, representing the balance in the room (this does not always happen!)
I kept an audio of the Q&A (and indeed the whole event) and ran it through transcription software, then tidied it up. That will be posted. I shared this article with several people who were present on the night, some of whom asked questions. They were invited to make comments on the post. One good point was about the risks in the “talk to someone else” aspect.
“Success” for this post is that this post is read, shared, and sparks conversation among organisers, experts, facilitators and attendees on what we currently expect from Q&As, what we get, what we could do differently.
In a separate post (yet to be written) I will look more into these questions, the persistence of “ego-fodder” and so on.. For now, I simply go through the audio clips of relevance and write about
“So you have come not to a Listening, but to a Meeting, which means you meet people.
[MH – Cute line – i think i may have coined it.]
“So what I’d like to do now is turn to the person near you who you don’t know, and if you have to get up and walk a couple of things, then fine. And just nothing, nothing big, nothing big. Just say hello, because these people will become friends, colleagues, whatever, and blossom.
So you’ve got two minutes to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know.”
[MH – so, even if someone has to leave before the Q&A, they get a chance to talk to someone they don’t know.
What I could have done better – given introverts a chance to opt out! People should not be forced to engage with people, after all. And there are also issues about women being forced to engage with creepy men. I don’t know how to finesse that, tbh.]
“Okay, everyone, if you could take your seat. So you can listen to the old white men at the front of the room who will tell you what to think.”
[MH A little lampshading/self-deprecation never hurts. Also, Kevin is old. And as for me, well, it’s weird being the same age as old people…]
During Kevin’s Presentation
Kevin was about 55 minutes into his presentation. There had been a couple of people asking questions earlier, to which he responded. Then the questions started coming thicker and faster – people were clearly keen to engage with what they’d been told, and tease out the implications. We were moving – de facto, into the Q and A. I was sat in the audience, and stuck up my hand.
““Can I make an observation?”
“Yeah”
“It’s 830, This meeting was going to finish at nine, and what’s happening is people are desperate to have to ask questions, and some of them are. But the people who are asking the questions are more confident and more well-informed. So there is a structural thing going on which we are trying from your presentation and mine to undercut
So my proposal is that you finish, we have two minutes for people to talk to the person next to them and the people who haven’t spoken get a chance to answer ask their questions.
And if we don’t do that, then the structural inequality and unfairness that you and I both think is baked in continues to be baked in.”
[MH This kind of “backseat facilitation” is not good. It should never have come to this, and that is on me. I should have stayed at the front of the room, (I wanted to see the slides though!) and should have agreed a hard time limit, with perhaps a “clap clinic”.]
After Kevin’s presentation
[It was heavy – the prospects for our species’ look bleak af.]
“Is everyone feeling sunny and optimistic?”
[MH – important to acknowledge heavy feelings, but not wallow in them. Irony as deflection or coping strategy…. ]
“Hey, what I’d like you to do is another two minutes, please, with the person you spoke to before, or someone else. If you have a question that is five sentences long, [laughter] get help boiling it down to two. If you have like, half a question, you’re not quite sure if it’s good enough. Number one, it probably is. Get help turning into a two sentence question.
“We’ll come back in two minutes, and we will start with people of any gender, any age, who have not yet spoken.
“And yes, we have been keeping eyes on all your faces. Two minutes. Thank you.”
[MH this is key, this two minutes (and I gave people closer to three.) The laughter at the fie sentence comment tells me that people recognise the problem.
If you can only get one innovation past the gate-keepers, then imo this is the one… it gives people a chance to think, talk and it gives you a chance to select ppl ‘at random’, meaning women etc. In my experience the people who get irritated at this are the ones who are used to being recognised by the person at the front choosing who will ask questions – because of their gender, or because they are part of the same tedious Trotskyist or Bakuninist groupuscule, and they realise that this format will open up the space and deprive them of their quasi-monopoly on asking questions/preening/
The beginning of the Q and A
“Thanks everyone. Hi, we’re going to come back and start taking questions
“Two things. One is the Labour Club would love you to buy beer or chips, crisps or whatever.
[MH = venue need to make money! If they do well at the till because of your event, it’s that much easier to rebook’]
“Number two, we do not have a hard stop at nine o’clock, but I am conscious that some people here will have babysitters or fatigue or work in the morning or whatever.
“If you have to go at nine, don’t feel ashamed that you’re somehow, you know, a flake.”
[MH – people who have to leave early may fear they are being judged as insufficiently interested/committed. It’s important to help them not see it that way. There’s a 1991 book about Californian anti-nuclear protests that has a great section about how people who were held in pens developed an ad-hoc ritual so those who had – for work or family reasons – to take the offer of bail – were not perceived as lunchouts by those who wanted to stick it out for as long as possible. Yes, this is how my mind works most of the time.]
“Kevin. you can find online, and he’ll respond to your emails if you’ve got questions. You can find me online, and I won’t respond to your questions, except for cash.
“So let’s have a show of hands from the people who want to ask questions who have not already asked questions.
“We’ve got number one, number two, number three.”
[MH – According to a) personal experience b) common sense and c) at least one academic work, “If a woman asked the first question, women in the audience were more likely to ask subsequent questions.”
BUT explicitly asking for women to ask questions is in my opinion almost always a bad move, and a sign that the meeting has been poorly designed, or facilitated or both. It iis going to a) irritate some men [but who cares tbh] and – far more importantly – b) put so much extra pressure on women because their question then has to be ‘excellent’ or they are letting their gender down.]
“So before we go to the third question, let’s have another show of hands if people want to ask questions who haven’t already. We’ve only got one at the minute. Two, so one, two. Next.”
[MH – I try to keep ahead like this, don’t let the queue get to zero, because it gives you as question chooser fewer options, and because it signals to some that the conversation is over when it might well not be.]
Presenters and facilitators don’t mix – Marc abusing his power.
I had as one of the “experts” answered a question about what is to be done. Then, when I was going to the next person with the mike, I remembered something else I wanted to say…
“And sorry. to come back to your question about what is to be done
When you hold meetings, try and get people meeting each other, and give people who haven’t had a chance to speak to speak like we’re doing tonight. We forget how – sorry this is me abusing my authority. You can’t take the conch from me. – we forget how alienating it is to go into a room where you don’t know anyone, to be talked at, and then for the Q and A to be dominated by confident people. And it’s those people who come to one meeting and then don’t come back who are lost forever. And they tell other people that they had a bad experience at the meeting, and then those other people don’t come back. And then I’ve seen waves in the mid, late 80s, in the – I was involved in climate camp -, I’ve seen XR – I’ve seen these waves where they hold a big public meeting. There’s lots of people who you’ve never seen before. They are at one meeting or two meetings that are badly designed and badly organized and dominated by old white men who won’t let go of the microphone [laughter] , and those people don’t come back. So design your meetings better. “
Keep hold of the microphone
marc hudson 16:35
“pro tip for anyone who’s holding the conch in this sort of public setting; never give the microphone back to the person who’s got a second question.”
[MH – obviously you have to allow for a bit of back and forth between a questoner and the presenter to whom the question has been directe. But that can tip over into a dialogue – or worse – dick-swinging contest. And if the microphone is physically in the audience-member’s hand, it can get super awkward (To be clear, it was not going to be that on this occasion, but there is a general principle)]
End of Q&A
“But now I’m going to manipulate you all. So when I was a physiotherapist, I knew that when I was doing a treatment session rehab with someone, they would go home, and the things that they would remember was the most vivid part of the treatment session. And the final part, this is a well known psychological thing called the peak end effect.
“So if you are holding a public meeting and the last question is really depressing, yours was not, sadly, what people will remember when they go home was the final bit and being depressed.
“You have an option, as the organizer of meeting to plant someone to ask the last question, which is, like, more upbeat or whatever. That’s kind of manipulative.
“What I like to do in these meetings is, what you’re going to do now is you’re going to talk to someone who you’ve not talked to tonight and just ,,,,
“Yeah, I know, I know it’s really like icky,”
[MH – I saw someone – an older man fwiw – grimace and eyeroll. This was absolutely fair enough. It was late, and I had already “forced” people out of their comfort zone twice that evening. It was all becoming a bit like some sort of happy-clappy Sunday School meeting.]
“but talk to them and just share your feelings and thoughts about what happened, so that you leave this meeting having met other people.
“We’re going to go into that, but before we do, I want a round of applause for me, [laughter] for Kevin, for Jonathan, and for you guys who asked questions, and for you guys who sat here for over two and a half hours, two hours and listened intently and challenged us both, round of applause.”
[MH – Applause is something all can join in. It’s tactile and loud and gives a final punctuation. But also, Sunday school]
“And now and now, the coerced mingling, the enforced mingling.”
[MH Coercive is usually the wrong word. But again, lampshading.]
After the formal end of the meeting
Some people left, but others did start talking to someone they hadn’t spoken to, and in some cases (I witnessed this) exchange contact details. This warmed the cockles (what ARE cockles?) of my ancient shrivelled cynical heart.
Thank you to Jonathan for letting me “run” the event.
Thank you to Kevin, who stuck around for ages afterwards engaging with people
Thank you to all the people who tolerate it, who went with it.
Finally – what did you think? What could have been done differently/better?
If you were there, did you appreciate (as distinct from enjoy) the facilitation. Was it cloying? Unhelpful? Irrelevant? Good?
Further work
Dey de Pryck, Jennie, and Marlène Elias. “Promoting inclusive facilitation of participatory agricultural research for development.” Development in Practice 33.1 (2023): 122-127.
Jasuja, I., Vanderkolk, J., Weston, E., Arrowood, H. I., Vore, A., & Starr, M. C. (2024). Gender Differences in Question Asking at the 2022 American Society of Nephrology Annual Kidney Week Meeting. Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, 19(2), 241-243.
Rakedzon, T., & Van Horne, C. (2024). “Curious Is as Curious Does”: Fostering Question-Asking in a Sino-Foreign Engineering School—A Case Study. Sustainability, 16(17), 7308.
Rezaee, M., Verde, A., Anchang, B., Mattonen, S. A., Garcia-Diaz, J., & Daldrup-Link, H. (2022). Disparate participation by gender of conference attendants in scientific discussions. Plos one, 17(1), e0262639.
Sandstrom, G. M., Carter, A., Croft, A., & Gibson, H. (2022). People draw on gender stereotypes to judge question-askers, but there is no such thing as a gender-stereotypic question.
Seventeen years ago, on this day, March 11th, 2008,
Australia’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol comes into effect:
ALSO –
The Government issues the Initial Report under the Kyoto Protocol detailing how Australia aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 385ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the question of emissions reductions for countries, especially for rich ones, had been the absolute core of the early international climate negotiations from 1988 onwards. Poor countries said, “Well, if there’s going to be a limit on who can emit what, we need to emit more so that we can bring our people up to a decent standard of living that you already have in the West. Therefore rich countries have to go first,“ And this was reluctantly, sort of accepted by rich countries. But targets and timetables had been kiboshed by the George HW Bush administration (1989-1993), Then by the time of the first COP in Berlin (1995), positions had hardened. But nonetheless, there was a Berlin Mandate for negotiations to happen among and for rich countries to come to the third COP with a plan for emissions reductions.
Australia, led by John Howard, had squealed and wailed and stamped its feet, and through that and sheer exhaustion, carved out an exceptionally generous deal at Kyoto, their “reduction” target was actually 108% and that’s before you even counted the Australia cause clause, the land clearing clause, which meant that ultimately, Australia’s target for “reduction” was 130% emissions higher than they had been
Still this wasn’t enough. So you had the Kabuki theater all through the 2000s about Kyoto ratification. And this is a some sort of indicator of virtue.
This is all very well covered in an academic article called The Veil of Kyoto.
See also Stephen Gardiner 2004.
See also Rayner and Prins 2008 “The Wrong Trousers”
So Labor’s Kevin Rudd had used Kyoto ratification as a stick to beat John Howard with. And it worked. And Rudd’s first action as prime minister was to ratify Kyoto. And here we are, three months later, utterly meaningless, but in the context of the road to Copenhagen, it showed Australian alleged willingness to be less of an asshole, Rudd had got a big standing ovation when he attended the Bali COP in 2007.
What I think we can learn from this
There are these sorts of synecdoche where signing this bit of paper, making this pledge, whatever is taken as an indicator, like a brown M&M, of seriousness.
What happened next
Rudd comprehensively flubbed the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and gave away more and more to the fossil fuel interests, hoping that they would eventually be happy. Eventually it was so weak that the Greens, who Rudd had been ignoring, couldn’t stomach it.
Thanks to Julia Gillard’s minority government, Australia then did eventually get some really weak carbon pricing which maybe had some influence on emissions (or maybe it was Tasmanian hydroelectric power entering the grid. )
Anyhoo, here we are with the emissions climbing and the impacts hitting us. But hey, Australia ratified the Kyoto Protocol…
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.
By Greg Allen https://www.npr.org/2015/03/10/392142452/florida-gov-scott-denies-banning-phrase-climate-change
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 401ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that even if the Florida governor didn’t ban mention of carbon dioxide, climate change, it’s entirely plausible that he could have. And these sorts of cultural battles in the United States with Republicans wanting to wish things they don’t like away, well known. It’s really the hide and seek tactic of a child who doesn’t understand that they’re not the center of the universe. “If I close my eyes and can’t see you, that means that you can’t see me.” The world doesn’t work like that, and most people figure that out when they’re quite young. Others, not so much.
What I think we can learn from this. In the following 10 years Florida has had various hurricanes which don’t stick around in public memory the way that I think things used to (maybe I could be wrong), and large parts of it are going to be reclaimed by the ocean, as per the 1958 warning by Frank Capra. (LINK)
And the Trump administration is De Santis writ large, without any of Governor Scott’s equivocation…
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 seven years ago, on this day, March 9th, 1998,
Gwen Andrews was appointed as Chief Executive Officer of AGO (Taplin and Yu, 2000: 104)
She never briefed Prime Minister John Howard!
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 366ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that John Howard had spent 1997 doing everything with his power to carve out the absolute sweetest deal possible for Australia at the Kyoto conference; up to and including the threat of not even signing. He had sent emissaries to other nations trying to build a coalition for Australia’s special position, without much success, it must be said. And he had also had to make some vague promises ahead of the Kyoto conference. So in October of ‘97 he had really released a stupid statement “Safeguarding Australia’s Future,” and had promised the creation of something called the Australian Greenhouse Office. Ooh, sounds like you’re taking action, doesn’t it, but no. So on this day, the AGO got its first director.
What I think we can learn from this is that solid, important sounding initiatives can be paper-thin Potemkin outfits. And so it came to pass.
What happened next
Gwen Andrews never gave Howard a briefing, I’m sure she was diligent and keen. Howard couldn’t have been less interested in engaging with the science, politics, economics of climate change. The AGO was there as a fig leaf alongside things like the Greenhouse Challenge.
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
Forty seven years ago, on this day, March 8th, 1978,
Senator WEBSTER (VICTORIA) (Minister for Science) – The baseline air pollution station at Cape Grim in Tasmania is viewed by the Government as being a particularly important installation. I have visited the base on one or two occasions and noted when I was there recently that there have been some results from the monitoring that has taken place. The honourable senator will know that monitoring has been in progress at Cape Grim since 1976 only. The tests which are currently being carried out there are particularly important so far as environmental conditions are concerned. Indeed, they might have much wider implications than just the effect of the environment. For instance, the surface ozone levels are being tested, as are the carbon dioxide levels, concentrations of carbon tetrachloride and fluoro carbons- that is, Freon-ll, which is discussed regularly as being an important constituent to monitor.
The period of measurement has been very short and I understand that no firm conclusion can be drawn on any trends which might be occurring within these programs. The results which have been obtained at Cape Grim to date suggest that carbon dioxide and Freon-ll are increasing as constituents in the atmosphere coming to Cape Grim. That is fairly important. Further data is required before it can be established whether these increased concentrations are part of a cyclical variation over a longer period or whether they are in actual fact indicative of a very definite trend in the atmosphere. That is the reason for the establishment of this baseline air pollution station, which is one of a group of stations placed around the world to monitor the atmosphere and to attempt to establish a baseline.
The Government intends in the future to establish the station permanently. Its management is under the control of the Department of Science, with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation playing an important role. We have put additional facilities and equipment down there within the last year. It is my wish that in the near future we shall see some move towards the establishment of a permanent station there.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 335ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that a few months earlier, the National Academy of Science in the US had released a report on energy and climate, and this had made front page news in the Canberra Times on sea level rise, etc.
Cape Grim as a measuring facility had been open for a couple of years. The CSIRO had an interest in CO2 build up, and was involved in some of the early work, especially Barrie Pittock and Graham Pearman ,and some politicians were aware of what was going on.
What I think we can learn from this is that we’ve been able to measure our doom for a long time, watching it unfold. The ultimate “press” disturbance.
What happened next
CO2, build-up kept bubbling under, bubbling through, an issue finally, finally broke through into public awareness in 1988.
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.
