Three posts today about something that happened on Monday 9th October 2006
Australian scientists and charities produced a report “Australia Responds: Helping Our Neighbours Fight Climate Change” – see this blog post
The Australian Labor Party piggy-backed its own statement about climate refugees – see this blog post
Therefore someone born on that day in the South Pacific would be turning 18. Happy Birthday (a letter to them here)
The only thing left to talk about, imo, is what is to be done now, by people of good intentions and determination?
I offer – for what it is worth, a few suggestions about what white middle-class people like me, with training and education, might usefully do. I am happy to be told I am wrong, but please be specific. I am happy to be told what I have missed – as per the organisations, I will add advice.
Then I link to organisations working on this stuff. I have no idea if they’re any good. The list is NOT exhaustive. If you know of other good organisations, please share and I will add them.
What is to be done
Educate yourselves and others about climate change – not the science (bare bones is enough there) but the politics, the techniques used by those who want to slow or stop action, the pathologies that affect social movements and civil society in their (so-far not all that impressive) efforts to make states and corporations be less ecocidal. Or do the ecocide slower.
One resource (I don’t do false modesty – is the AOY site. It’s ramshackle, under-signposted but not actually THAT hard to use. There’s a search box.
Another resource (I don’t do false modesty; it’s a passive-aggressive extortion bid for attention and reassurance) is ME. I am MORE than happy to come on podcasts, do workshops etc. I am, on my day, a good communicator and also designer/executor of formats that are genuinely participatory and energising. Hit me up
You need to know about – the history (at least a little) of Australia’s international criminality on climate change, which is ABSOLUTELY 100% bipartisan. There is net zero significant different between LNP and ALP on this.
Take sustained action. Sorry, but that means being involved, at least a little bit, in a group.
Groups suck. They are riven with (usually undeclared) turf wars, brittle egos, dysfunction etc. They waste time on pointless meetings
But if you try to do stuff on your own you will be a) less effective and b) very likely shorter-lived in your efforts.
Groups suck. But suck it up…
Try to be a less-terrible ally.
People of colour, poor people etc have got far more immediate (and, gasp) important things to be doing than helping well-meaning white people be less-terrible allies. It’s exhausting emotionally, it means they have less time for the stuff they need to do.
There already exist LOADS of resources for white people to get stuck into. Here’s a brief. Please suggest additions. Please USE these resources. Please step into discomfort (together) and stay there.
Liu, Helena. “White allyship.” In Redeeming Leadership, pp. 141-156. Bristol University Press, 2020
If you have academic training and access to resources, do two things
First, share the skills you have – research, writing, etc – with people who want to take on those tasks. Don’t be a chokepoint, for your own particular needs
Secondly, expose lies and tell the truth. Study the rich. There is so much to be done, so few doing it.
Organisations
[NB This is from a google search. If someone else who actually knows first-hand has made a better list, I will take this down and point to their work]
This workshop will explore how we can build solidarity with climate impacted and marginalized communities, by understanding the ways that systems of oppression impact our activism, everyday lives and those of our communities.
On Saturday 6th (well, Sunday 7th am Australia time) I was uploading already written and proofed blog posts to the website. I had enough attention left in me to realise that at least a year ago I had fouled up my database, and the upcoming post for “October 9” was utterly invalid. To see if I could easily Close The Gap,I went to my SHED (Secret Huge Eco Database) to see what I had for that date.
I found something old that I knew about but had never really understood its implications. Or maybe, to be extra-fair to myself – the implications weren’t apparent when I entered it.
This has led to, shall we say “a flurry of activity.”
On Monday October 9, 2006, a group of Australian charities and pressure groups, who’d been working with the CSIRO, released a report “Australia Responds: Helping Our Neighbours Fight Climate Change.” (download here if you like).
“
It called for lots of sensible things, including
Increase Australia’s overseas development assistance (ODA) in line with most other developed nations to 0.5% of GNI by 2009 10, and 0.7% by 2015.
Review Australia’s immigration program in light of the expected impacts of climate change. This review should consider mechanisms to support people displaced by climate change within the region. • Make a strong commitment to support disaster risk reduction, mitigation and preparedness measures within the ODA program.
Adopt a national framework for reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% of 1990 levels by 2050, with an implementation timetable that will provide a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
By the way, something else really important happened on the same day – Anthony Albanese made a statement on how Australia needed to take climate refugees.
You can also read my Open Letter to a Tuvaluan turning 18.
And here is a fourth post (no, nobody has ever told me to shut my damn mouth – why do you ask) tying it together and suggesting some answers to the only question that matters “What is to be done?” It also has links to various organisations trying to help.
The context was the Australian government under Bob Hawke had made noises about accepting climate refugees. Keating ignored the whole issue, and under him the “fuck the world, we’re gonna sell soooo much coal bwahahahaha” strategy got moving. John Howard dialed it up to eleven. Then 12. John Howard belongs in one particular place close to sea-level. That place is The Hague.
From Labour’s “Our Drowning Neighbours” discussion paper
What we learn is that
NGOs can get scientists on board, and work their guts out and it will be a one-day wonder. A political party (especially in Opposition) will piggyback on the work. And the media will very very quickly lose interest, for a variety of structural reasons.
And so it came to pass.
What happened next
The report generated a certain amount of attention.
The low lying nation of Kiribati is just one of our Pacific neighbours facing the real day to day effects of climate change.
Rising sea levels, huge tides and unpredictable winds are already a part of life there. So what do you do when climate change is literally on your doorstep?
Anyway, then the caravan moved on. Peter Garrett, the next climate spokesman after Anthony Albanese, name-checked it in February 2007 at Labor’s little shindig at Parliament House.
But the whole question of accepting climate refugees in the future became, well, somewhat awkward under Julia Gillard. Then along came Tony “Stop the Boats” Abbott and that’s all she wrote.
What happened nextmore generally.
The NGOs kept NGOing.
Meanwhile
The coal exports kept rising.
This had consequences.
The bank balances of Very Important People kept rising.
The donations – official and unofficial – to parties and individuals – kept rising.
Which was all great, obviously , and far more important than the fact that
The emissions kept rising.
The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide kept rising.
The seas kept rising.
The whole language of “climate refugees” became a bit awks for the Gillard Government, so was shelved. Everyone moved on.
But the issue did not go away, and then – in November 2023…
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.
Eighteen years ago, on Monday October 9, 2006, the climate spokesman of the Australian Labor Party (then in opposition, and positioning itself to attack Prime Minister John Howard ahead of an election due soon-ish) released a statement with the snappy title
“Labor calls for International Coalition to Accept Climate Change Refugees”
It begins
“It’s in Australia’s national interest that we lead on climate change, not wait decades to act.
While the Minister for Environment accepts Australia “does have a substantial role to play in helping smaller, less-developed countries” that will be devastated by rising sea levels, he fails to show leadership. The Howard Government does not have a strategy to combat climate change and its impact on Pacific countries.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
You should be able to view it on Anthony Albanese’s very own website. It was there as of 0530 Australian Time. If it is no longer there, for some inexplicable reason, well, you can see screenshots and the text are at the foot of this post – Just Scroll On. I’ve even added some hyperlinks and footnotes [in square brackets].
By the way, something else really important happened on the same day – a coalition of human rights and development organisations released a report called “Australia Responds: Helping Our Neighbours Fight Climate Change”. Here’s a post about that.
And here is a fourth post (no, nobody has ever told me to shut my damn mouth – why do you ask) tying it together and suggesting some answers to the only question that matters “What is to be done in solidarity?” It also has links to various organisations trying to help.
The context was that in the late 1980s the Hawke government (Labor, for the younger readers who may not know) was trying to both Care About “The Greenhouse Effect” and also flog a lot more coal (e.g. January 30, 1989). In August 1988 two academics had flagged the possibility of climate refugees and Australia’s responsibilities, at a conference in Sydney. At the July 1989, at the 20th South Pacific Forum, well look at what the Australian Financial Reviewreported
“Both Australia and New Zealand indicated that they and the rest of the world would undoubtably be prepared to take humanitarian action in moving people driven out by rising waters” reported Steve Burrell in an article titled “ENVIRONMENT DOMINATES FORUM” from Tarawa, Kiribati, The Australian Financial Review, 12 July 1989.
The same year English science communicator James Burke had produced a show – shown in Australia called After the Warming. It is – spoiler – about the future of a warming world, in which he included a scenario about climate refugees getting machine-gunned. Watch it on Youtube here. (1)
Then, in late 1991 Hawke lost a Labor Party room spill (there’d been one earlier in the year). The next Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, killed the “greenie nonsense.” A carbon tax was proposed and defeated by big business (1994-5) and then vacuous “voluntary action” was proposed. The Liberal Government of John Howard had been in power from March 1996 and had dialled Keating’s climate vandalism up to 11. And then to 12. By 2006 the Australians were still alongside the USA as the public face of the Venus Lobby, but Labor were beginning to use climate as one of the sticks to beat Howard with.
What we learn is that
Labor in opposition were shameless attention hounds, willing to piggie-back on other people’s intellectual and political work (then again, ‘the game’s the game’).
Labor in opposition were willing to make all sorts of lovely sounding (vague-ish) promises and enough civil society organisations either roll over and squee with delight, or refuse to get their shit together to say “yeah, honey, you don’t make that happen, there’s gonna be serious trouble.”
More generally
Political parties like to be parasites on civil society. They like to take what they want (in this case a chance to get more news for their guff) and don’t really care about the consequences for the wider ecosystem, if they can even see it (mostly they can’t).
For political parties civil society is at best a place to get authenticity, credibility and competent/ambitious personnel from especially when in opposition or facing a new challenge they can’t trot out the usual bullshit with confidence and without reputational risk.
For political parties civil society is at worst (and therefore usually) a bunch of clever and determined people who are agitated and agitating about how, now that you are in government you are not in fact keeping any of the nice (vague) promises you made when in opposition. Poach the smartest, install your own meatpuppets, defund and deride is the main way of dealing with them, alongside some patronising guff about “politics is the art of the possible, you have to govern from the centre” and all the other excuses. Make sure you keep big business sweet, because when pitchfork season comes (and it does, periodically), they are the guys who might send the helicopter to get you out of the palace.
If only somebody had written a short perfect book that ended with this
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
What happened next
Then Labor leader Kim Beazley got knifed by Kevin “I’m from Queensland, I’m here to help” Rudd about six weeks later [Wikipedia]. The shadow climate portfolio went to Peter “in the end the rain comes down” Garrett, who name-checked the “Australia Responds” report (see next post) in February 2007 and then turned his attention to helping funnel enormous sums of taxpayer money to a real climate response, namely Carbon Capture and Storage.
Happy times.
Albo took on other jobs over the years. I don’t quite recall where he is these days, but wherever it is, I am sure he is working day and night to turn the fine words of 2006 into real policy. Oh yes. BUT, in the interests of fairness, alongside all his sterling work to expand coalmines, there was, in fact, in November 2023, an agreement to offer Tuvaluans (280 a year) visas to study and/or work in Australia.
Journalist James Burke reports from the year 2050, where humans and the Earth have survived global warming. Using an innovative device called the “Virtual Reality Generator,” a computer effect that projects different environments on a location, Burke shows various scenarios of global warming and illustrates the potential effects of today’s actions. Burke also addresses the impact of climate change on historical events (and vice versa).
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.
It’s in Australia’s national interest that we lead on climate change, not wait decades to act. [AOY1]
While the Minister for Environment [2] accepts Australia “does have a substantial role to play in helping smaller, less-developed countries” that will be devastated by rising sea levels, he fails to show leadership. The Howard Government does not have a strategy to combat climate change and its impact on Pacific countries.
On today’s AM program [3], Senator Campbell’s limp response was to put off action: “The major impacts, the long-term impacts, of climate change will take many decades to unfold.”
Pacific countries need a plan now, not when they are already under water. [4]
Tuvalu is expected to become uninhabitable within 10 years because of rising sea levels, not in “many decades” as the Minister said. [5]
Pacific countries are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events, including contamination of their fresh water supplies.
Labor supports the Kyoto Protocol [6] and has a comprehensive plan to assist Pacific countries threatened by climate change.
Labor’s policy discussion paper, Our Drowning Neighbours, advocates the establishment of an international coalition, led by Australia, to accept climate change refugees from Pacific countries.
The paper recommends the establishment of a Pacific Climate Change Centre to monitor climate change, protect fresh water sources and plan for emergency evacuation where necessary.
Labor welcomes the release of today’s report, Australia Responds: Helping Our Neighbours Fight Climate Change, by a coalition of groups including Oxfam and World Vision.
The report reinforces Labor’s call for urgent action to reduce greenhouse emissions and highlights the need for climate change to also be addressed through the aid budget.
All Our Yesterdays footnotes, from October 2024
[1] Yes, the national interest. Which seems to be always identical to the short-term needs of the fossil fuel industry and its mates, no matter which political party is pretending to hold the reins of power. Not to rain on anyone’s parade (btw, in the end the rain comes down, obliterates the streets of the Blue Sky Town. Just sayin’]
[2] The hapless Senator Campbell. Clive Hamilton is spectacularly rude about him in Scorcher, a book worth reading. Howard replaced Campbell with some guy called Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull urged Honest John to ratify Kyoto (no dice). Turnbull went on to a storied career as a fearless, skilful and highly successful policy entrepreneur on climate, outmanoeuvring the forces of darkness and saving both Australia’s reputation and its physical safety.
[3] Ah, the ABC. Bless. This suggests, btw, that the press release might well have been a brainfart on the day – an ambitious policy wonk suggesting an anodyne statement hooked onto the Australia Responds report would be enough to get some headlines, and punch the bruise that was Howard’s climate dilemma. I could probably find out, maybe. But the game would not be worth the candle.
[4] Thank goodness Albo has worked tirelessly these last 18 years to turn that banal exhortation into shiny reality. (ahahahaha- which stands for All Hail Albanese All Hail Albanese)
[5] Really? And the scientific basis for this headline grabbing claim is? Is? It’s almost as if the ALP doesn’t care about either science or the credibility of environmentalism, if there is a momentary advantage to be had.
This paper investigates how the Kyoto Protocol has framed political discourse and policy development of greenhouse gas mitigation in Australia. We argue that ‘Kyoto’ has created a veil over the climate issue in Australia in a number of ways. Firstly, its symbolic power has distracted attention from actual environmental outcomes while its accounting rules obscure the real level of carbon emissions and structural trends at the nation-state level. Secondly, a public policy tendency to commit to far off emission targets as a compromise to implementing legislation in the short term has also emerged on the back of Kyoto-style targets. Thirdly, Kyoto’s international flexibility mechanisms can lead to the diversion of mitigation investment away from the nation-state implementing carbon legislation. A final concern of the Kyoto approach is how it has shifted focus away from Australia as the world’s largest coal exporter towards China, its primary customer. While we recognise the crucial role aspirational targets and timetables play in capturing the imagination and coordinating action across nations, our central theme is that ‘Kyoto’ has overshadowed the implementation of other policies in Australia. Understanding how ‘Kyoto’ has framed debate and policy is thus crucial to promoting environmentally effective mitigation measures as nation-states move forward from COP15 in Copenhagen to forge a post-Kyoto international agreement. Recent elections in 2009 in Japan and America and developments at COP15 suggest positive scope for international action on climate change. However, the lesson from the 2007 election and subsequent events in Australia is a caution against elevating the symbolism of ‘Kyoto-style’ targets and timetables above the need for implementation of mitigation policies at the nation-state level.
In English? It’s all make-believe. It’s all kayfabe.
I hope your 18th birthday is a day of happiness for you (1) with your family, friends and wider community.
Birthdays are celebrations, time for reflection and thinking about the future. There was a time when that was mostly in the context of a person’s own circumstances, and that of their family. Over the last generation – since before you were born – birthdays (and of course every day) happen with the dreadful knowledge of climate change.
I am not going to explain to someone living in the South Pacific what that means.
For the people where I live, sea level rise is an abstract thing. They think – if they think of it at all – as lines on a graph. For people where I live, storms that flatten towns and islands are something they see in Hollywood disaster movies or, lately, on television news programs.
Nor am I not going to whitesplain colonialism, extractivism or the ways your life is hemmed in by rich people and their corporations who want to get richer.
I am not going to lecture you about white people who claim to have your best interests at heart, Through The Power Of The Free Markets or under some other banners. You know all about these types of people, their words and the value of those words from your own life, from the hard-won wisdom of your parents and your elders.
All I have got for you is the following.
The day you were born, Monday October 9th, 2006, Australian charities and scientists were trying to get Australian politicians to give a damn about the problems climate change was already causing for your parents, and the ever-greater threat it would pose to you as you grew from child to adult.
Australian politicians either ignored this report, or used it as a step up for their own hollow ambition.
If I could see you, I suspect I would see a raised eyebrow and a quiet smile. “You expect surprise? Shock?”
When I was turning 18, the newspapers and television (this was before the Internet, long before social media) were full of “The Greenhouse Effect,” as we called climate change back then.
So my first advice’ – let no-one tell you that somehow they didn’t know.
If you will allow a second, final piece of advice. It is natural for a young person on the cusp of adulthood to be deeply frustrated with the world they have inherited, that those older have not sorted out the big problems. On climate, please do not blame your parents. Or your grandparents. The people of the South Pacific have been raising their voices for decades, pleading with the rich countries to act, explaining that the peril facing the South Pacific would grow and grow, and devour everything.
That they were basically ignored is not the fault of the speakers, but those too greedy, arrogant and stupid to listen. The problem is not to be found in Kiribati, or Tuvalu or anywhere near you. The problem is in New York, Manchester, Canberra, Adelaide, Auckland, Berlin. And elsewhere. But I am not here, in this letter, for geopolitics.
For my part, I will continue my inadequate efforts. I will try to be an ally. I will fail repeatedly, of course. But people like me – with privilege, education, water coming out of my tap and food in my belly – have far more to do than we have been doing, if we want to be able to look you – and any children you have – in the eye.
Finally, I hope, despite the knowledge of what is coming (some of it is already here, but so much more is to come), that your celebrations are full of joy. And at some point, of course, thanks to the November 2023 agreement, welcome to Australia.
Footnote
By the way, you are both a tired rhetorical device, but at the same time, you are flesh and blood; dozens and dozens of real human beings, with names, hopes, families, endangered homes, becoming an “adult” (or turning 18 – perhaps that does not have the same cultural or legal weight where you live) across the South Pacific.
Nigel Calder’s article in New Scientist on 8 Oct 1964 (at the time of the 1964 general election). Calder’s article expressed dissatisfaction with the similar policies offered by the two main parties, and called for the creation of two very different political parties, X and Y. This seminal article basically espoused two different visions of the future: ‘Party X’ technocratic, ‘Party Y’ ‘ecological’. What is interesting about Calder’ s vision is how much of the vision for ‘Party Y’ was to become part of the early 1970s environmental message.
(Herring, 2001)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 320ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that awareness of environmental problems was growing. Whether it was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, or the Buchanan report about traffic in cities. And it was clear that there were unmet political needs because both main parties were all about economic growth. And the proposal for a technocrat party and an ecological party as we would never call them was a sensible one. But there are simply too many cross cutting needs and myths. These are not the official lines as people see them, because people think they can have their cake and eat it. And for a certain amount of time you can, but eventually, you look down and you have an empty plate and a face full of food. You no longer have your cake.
What we learn is that these debates about technology “versus” ecology whatever, they go back. Well, they go back earlier than 1964. But they were expressed plainly in New Scientist in 1964.
What happened next? The article was, I’m told, influential in some circles, largely ignored more broadly.
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.
Sixty-six years ago today (October 8th, 1958) British meteorologist Gordon Manley wrote to his friend, steam engineer Guy Callendar, who had – for the past twenty-plus years had been banging on about carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere as a (or even the) factor affecting the climate.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 315ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the International Geophysical Year was happening. More people were coming on board with the carbon dioxide theory, Gilbert Plass, GER Deakin, Appleton, etc. And Manley was congratulating Guy Callendar bless.
What we learn is that Guy Callendar was getting a little bit of recognition and was getting published still in journals like Tellus and so forth. But he wasn’t being carried through the streets on people’s shoulders, as perhaps he should have been. Such is the nature of humanity when the wrong person making the announcement, if you’re Miss Triggs.
What we learn is that you can be right and not get the credit you deserve. That’s one of the oldest stories in the book.
What happened next Callendar had a couple of more really astute observations in him about, for example, why theories aren’t popular, and so forth. And he died in 1964, 37 years to the day after Svante Arrhenius died.
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.
References
CP 1, Gordon Manley to Callendar, 8 October 1958, cited in Fleming, 2007
Fourteen years ago, on this day, October 7th, 2010,
Gillard scraps climate assembly
ByPaul Osborne
October 7, 2010 — 5.12pm
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has scrapped her election promise of a citizens’ assembly to deal with climate change, a scheme the opposition described as a dud anyway.
Ms Gillard said other aspects of the party’s election platform – including subsidising the replacement of older cars, rolling out renewable energy projects linked to $1 billion of new transmission lines and improving energy efficiency – would still go ahead.
Ms Gillard on Thursday chaired the first meeting of the multi-party climate change committee – one of the promises made to the Australian Greens and independents to gain support to form minority government.
In a communique released after the meeting, the committee confirmed its intention to “work co-operatively across party lines
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 390ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Julia Gillard had challenged Kevin Rudd for the leadership at the Labor Party in July, having had enough of his bullshit. There are some quite interesting and plausible accounts of what happened and how it happened. Then she’d gone to an early election. It had been going okay. Mostly, it’s gonna be tight, but Labor looked like they were going to win. Then some leaks started happening from within the cabinet. Funny that. So it was a hung parliament and Gillard had to negotiate with independents like Tony Windsor and Rob Oakshott, and the Greens to form a minority government. And therefore, her idea of a climate assembly – having 150 people to talk about the issue for a year, which she had been persuaded by some Blairite advisor – was now a non-starter, because the Independents wouldn’t wear it. The Independents wanted action. And so therefore, there was the Multi Party Committee on Climate Change, which she invited the Liberals and the Nationals to join (while knowing full well that they wouldn’t).
What we learn is that the climate assembly idea might have worked, if Rudd had come up with it (see Rudd’s “2020” event in 2008). But these processes always get dominated by the loudest, most cashed up and determined. They’re rarely particularly deliberative, especially if the stakes are high. And anyway, by 2010, the timing was all wrong. What could have looked like a sensible circuit breaker now just looked like weakness.
What happened next? How long have you got? MPCCC had its meetings, advised by Ross Garneau, etc. It came up with some legislation. Gillard put that through Parliament. It did an advertising campaign. But by then, Tony Abbott had successfully framed it as “a great big tax on everything” and had also fatally wounded Gillard in public perception. I think Gillard was a successful Prime Minister in terms of the amount of legislation she got through. She was a steady hand on the tiller. But then she also lacks certain things. For example, a penis and children. Therefore, awful, awful woman.
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 six years ago, on this day, October 6th, 1997,
Senator Robert Hill, the federal Minister for the Environment, rejected Japan’s proposal of a 5% uniform reduction in emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2012 on the basis that it would result in unacceptable job losses in Australia (ABC television 7.00 pm news 6.10.97)
(Duncan, 1997:10)
Same day President Bill Clinton hosts pre-Kyoto climate conference at the White House… (see New York Times coverage here).
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 364ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that John Howard as prime minister had taken hostility of Australian political elites to the climate treaty from a solid eight through to 11. (“This one goes up to 11.”) And he had sent diplomats around the world over the course of 1997 to try and convince everyone that Australia deserved special treatment at the impending Kyoto meeting, without much success, it has to be said. The Americans were mocking him. Anyway, this above one attempt to break the logjam by the hosts. The Japanese posed an across the board 5% cut from everyone. Now this wouldn’t have been in keeping with the science but it was a bid worth making. The fact that Australia just turned round with a flat rejection tells you plenty.
What we learn is that Australian political elites just don’t give a shit about the future. All they care about is filling their own pockets with loot in the here and now. This is not uncommon, of course.
What happened next? Howard was rewarded for his efforts. Australia managed to get not only 108% so called reductions target, i.e. they got to increase their emissions. But also just through sheer trickery and nastiness they managed to get a land clearing clause backdated to 1990. So that in effect, the emissions reduction target was 130% essentially, de facto if not the jure.
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.
Thirty five years ago, on this day, October 5th, 1989, Australian Federal Environment Minister Graham Richardson warns Prime Minister Bob Hawke that he will have to save Kakadu (i.e. ban mining) to win the election, because green-minded voters will accept nothing less. (See Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty for details)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Australia had been digging up and exporting minerals for good 25 years in large quantities. And the whole concept of Aboriginal land rights and sacred sites was nothing important back then. Not to the white people anyway. But by the mid-late 80s, that was changing. And the idea for an expansion of the uranium mine at Kakadu that would damage the National Park was a vote loser in the marginal inner city constituencies where Labor hoped it would be able to cling on to power at the next federal election. This had to happen early in 1990 and therefore Graeme Richardson, who was Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s very effective environment minister, was telling Hawke that he was going to have to save Kakadu even though this was going to seriously piss off the mining lobby. The mining lobby feared that it was the beginning of serious restrictions on their ability to plunder, sorry to “develop”, Australia’s resources for their own benefit. And Hawke took that on board; he delayed the decision and took the credit for that.
What we learn is that these seemingly tangential issues are important to understand if you want to understand how climate policy works
What happened next Labor did in fact squeak home in the March 1990 election, and then had a quid pro quo debt to keep the Ecologically Sustainable Development process.
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 mere 17 years after the UK government first said it was indeed going to support Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), another bold (but vague) announcement has arrived. This one accompanied with a telephone number vague promise (£22 bn of taxpayer money spread over an alleged 25 years).
Reeves’ article – titled “Today, with our £22bn pledge for carbon capture, Labour’s green revolution for Britain begins “ – reads as if it were drafted by a ChatGPT knock-off trained entirely on industry press releases (“gamechanging technology” “4000 jobs“) and then ‘improved’ with the liberal and random sprinkling of sub-Blairite phonemes (“That’s what drives this government to do things differently. That’s the change we are offering. And that is the change we are determined to deliver.”)
Perhaps the general lesson is the extraordinary power of the fossil fuel lobby, able to get a chancellor who has taken body blows already for having a “treasury brain” and an aversion to any promises of public spending to come out so openly for a huge expenditure with such weak public support.
It’s not clear that it is much more than a confirmation of a similar announcement from the Tories, with confirmation that projects everyone knew were “winning” in the third competition for taxpayer support. As the ever-astute FT writers point out
“the three industrial sites receiving support to attach carbon capture technology to their projects fall short of the eight which entered negotiations with the government last year. The prospects of support are now unclear for the remainder.”
Before explaining some of the history and talking about what we can reasonably expect to happen next, I’d like to offer two ways of thinking about CCS.
First, take the famous thought-experiment of the physicist Schrodinger, in which a cat in a box can be thought of as both dead and alive simultaneously. CCS is, when its proponents want it to be, a mature, proven technology that just needs “policy certainty” (which mostly seems to be code for whopping great Research, Development and Deployment grants and subsidies and generous under-written-by-the-taxpayer ‘market’ mechanisms). At other times, when research money is being dispensed or decades of delay, under-delivery or downright failure need to be explained away, CCS is a nascent technology, deserving of additional patience and faith. Always dead and alive simultaneously.
Second, if the cat is too cliched, turn your attention to one of the only great Hollywood sequels, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. You will recall it is about a world under the threat of a man-made environmental catastrophe, but for the most part oblivious. CCS can be thought of as the liquid metal assassin. It’s able to shape shift at will (CCS has been a technology that would save the coal industry, then one that would reduce industrial emissions, then one that would enable the production of so-called ‘blue hydrogen’ and is now even part of sucking random air out of the atmosphere (Direct Air Capture). Like the liquid metal nemesis, it is also incredibly hard to kill. No matter how many failures it endures, there it is, impassive, gleaming, ready for another bout.
The super-short version of this history (and really, there’s a best-selling (1) and award-winning (2) book about this just waiting for your credit card details) is as follows
Man-made climate change first went properly viral in 1953. Oil companies have known about the possible problem of climate change for a long time. A Shell representative wrote an article in the New Scientist minimising it in…. Any takers? … October 1959.
In the early 1970s oil companies started -for entirely different reasons – capturing carbon dioxide and pushing it into oil wells. This was to push extra oil out so it could be sold and burned. This is known as “Enhanced Oil Recovery” and is still a large part of the business model for today’s CCS. The cannier among you may have noticed that doing this would not actually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being released from below the ground into the atmosphere. In so many ways CCS is a Shrodinger’s Cat of a “climate mitigation” technology
In the mid-1970s, an Italian physicist, Cesar Marchetti, proposed large scale CCS as a climate solution (with storage being done in the deep oceans). (See my letter in Private Eye). There was a momentary flurry of interest in CCS in 1989, as politicians responded to scientific and public concerns about “the greenhouse effect”, but they quickly realised it would be incredibly expensive, risky and complicated. Attention turned to “clean coal.” In one of life’s little ironies, exactly 31 years ago today (October 4, 1993, the newly-appointed head of the World Coal Institute was reported as saying that the move toward clean coal technologies would be stepped up in the next five years.
With the coming of the Kyoto Protocol it was obvious that eventually some sort of climate technologies (whether actually implemented or not) would be needed by the fossil fuel companies and their supporters. The Blair Government started making appreciative noises, but refused to support a BP proposal in 2005-7. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a competition to support development and deployment of face-saving…. Sorry, coal-saving technology. That competition fizzled out, but not before a junior Tory minister in the Coalition government told Parliament in June 2010 that
… the coalition Government are committed to carbon capture and storage, which will be a major plank in our efforts to decarbonise our energy supply by 2030; we are committed to the generation of 5 GW of CCS by 2020.
Another competition began. Almost exactly nine years ago (late 2015) Treasurer George Osborne spectacularly and sneakily pulled the rug on a mere 1 billion pound competition (this was back in those innocent pre-pandemic days when 1 billion was real money).
CCS could have died as a policy option in the UK. That it didn’t is down to a relatively small loose network of highly-motivated and skilled individuals who brought it back from the dead. (In my book I call this the Kipling Manoeuvre, for, well, reasons. Did I mention my book is for sale in no good bookshops, but you can order it from good bookshops and bad. Also, online.)
That Kipling process of recreating a consensus around CCS was basically complete by November 2018. The last 6 years have been a spectacular go-slow, of perseverating, consultationitis, head-scratching, and can-kicking. Even the hosting of a COP didn’t get the UK government to make a decision….
That’s a very UK-centric history (the clue is in the title of The Book). For an international perspective, there are other books, academic articles, et cetera. And then there is this video.
Burning the uncapturable Midnight Oil
In February 1990, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at about 353ppm, the Australian band Midnight Oil released a single “Blue Sky Mine”, also the title of the album.
It’s a banger.
It describes a corporate scandal around an asbestos mine. It will shock you to learn that the owners knew the dangers, but the workforce was cheap, disposable, and, well, what do you think happened?
Three lines come to mind
“They pay the truth makers…”
CCS is surrounded by armies of well-paid PR flaks, churning out soothing talking points. But they’re not the only truth makers. There are other people trusted to create “value-neutral” knowledge who may not always be quite so value-neutral as they want (everyone) to believe. There’s a rather interesting letter in today’s Financial Times…
The other lines – I will let you fill in the blanks – are
“And the company takes what the company wants.”
“And nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground”
What next? Expect “me too” and resistance. Accidents will happen
Four final predictions.
First, Scottish advocates of CCS will be unsurprised but fuming; always the bridesmaid… They might sing another Australian song “What About Me? “What about me? It isn’t fair. I don’t have enough, now I want my share”) and continues “And now I’m standing on the corner, All the world’s gone home Nobody’s changed, nobody’s been saved” I predict that the Scots will be singing it, lustily, via glossy reports, scientific papers and everything in between.
Second, the “anti-CCS” forces will grow, coalesce. Until now they have been relatively muted in the UK since a brief flurry in the late 2000s, when they killed off the idea of building new “capture-ready” coal-fired power plants..
Expect more of these sorts of statements and campaigns (I will add to the list below) and, of course, expect counter-attacks from CCS’s powerful advocates (“uninformed,” “NIMBY,” “Luddite,” “anti-progress,” “hypocritical” etc)
Three, there will be further delays and reversals, over policy, funding, deployment. Don’t count out battles over the path of carbon dioxide pipelines, or the other transport infrastructure.
Don’t be surprised if the “permanent” storage isn’t quite as certain as the blithe assurances would have you believe.
Finally. In 1990 the atmospheric blanket of heat-trapping carbon dioxide was 354 ppm. This year it hit a new record of 426. It is absolutely certain next year will be higher. All the CCS in the world, all the “Direct Air Capture” in the world (don’t even start me on that) will not change that, ever. CCS would at best slow down the acceleration of the thickening of the blanket, at great cost.
We have no idea what we are into, and we have no idea which consequences are going to come how fast in which order. Buckle up.
“
