“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.
And everything Australia has done since then I am sure gives confidence to people living in that part of the world that everything will be just fine…
Why this matters.
Why should anyone trust Australian diplomats?
What happened next?
Australia expanded its domestic use of coal and – more importantly – its exports. So, for example, seven years later (see next post).
Oh, and folks made jokes about islands getting swamped.
Climate Camps were all the rage at the time, after the first one, in Yorkshire, England in August/September 2006.
Time travel cheat, a bit, here’s an account of what happened days later –
July 13 & 14, 2008: Newcastle, NSW, Australia Climate Camp stops coal trains at worlds’ largest coal export port
On July 13, 2008 approximately 1000 activists stopped three trains bound for export at the Carrington Coal Terminal for almost six hours. Dozens of protesters were able to board and chain themselves to the trains while others lay across the tracks. Hundreds were held back by mounted police. Police arrested 57.[19]
Sunday 13th July 2008: 1000 people gathered at Islington Park in Newcastle for a rally and march to the Carrington Coal Terminal. It was a colourful and eclectic crowd of local residents, parents and children, percussionists, clowns, students, and concerned citizens from every state in Australia. Their message was simple and clear: let’s see renewables instead of more new coal.
On this day, July 7, 1970,Bede Callaghan, the Managing Director of the [Australian] Commonwealth Banking Corporation, said some really Roger Hallam-ite/Extinction Rebellionesque stuff
“On 7 July 1970, Mr Bede Callaghan, managing director of the Commonwealth Banking Corporation spoke on the ‘Perils and Pitfalls of the Seventies’ at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Adelaide.”
(Whitelock, 1971:29)
According to another book, Callaghan said the following:
“And so the sprawling city, the maimed country, and even the air we breathe and the sea that gives us life, combine into what can only be described as a coming nightmare unless we as a people are prepared to become violently Australia-conscious and to replan, decentralise, preserve,prohibit and police. We won’t correct the situation unless first as individuals and secondly as a nation we are prepared to think, to take care and to spend money.”
This kind of rhetoric was not that unusual at the time (1970). We should remember that when we put faith in information-deficit models, and the Power of Exhortation…
What happened next?
By 1973 all this stuff was ancient history. It has come back periodically since then. So it goes.
On this day, July 4, in 2004 WWF Australia brought together various outfits as “the Australian Climate Group.”
They said –
“An unprecedented alliance of commercial and scientific experts has formed the Australian Climate Group (ACG) which today launched its first report, Climate Change: Solutions for Australia. The Report is designed to guide public opinion and government policy towards a solution to the issues of climate change”
The context? John Howard was wrecking the joint, blocking even the most minor climate action. People and organisations kept trying to organise…
Why this matters.
This is what (some) NGOs do – they try to build coalitions/alliances of actors to chip away at the legitimacy, the hegemony of those they don’t like. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t.
What happened next?
It didn’t do much. This was the period of peak-Howard. Two years later, a Westpac-led effort (iirc put together by Australian Conservation Foundation) had a bit more traction.
On this day, July 3, in 2008, 27 Greenpeace activists entered the 2,640 megawatts Eraring Power Station site north of Sydney to call for an energy revolution, and took direct action to stop coal from being burnt.
“Twelve protesters shut down and chained themselves to conveyors while others climbed onto the roof to paint ‘Revolution’ and unfurled a banner reading ‘Energy Revolution – Renewables Not Coal’. The action preceded the Australian government’s climate change advisor Professor Ross Garnaut’s delivery of his Draft Climate Change Review on July 4”
Greenpeace activists, including an ex-miner, block the coal supply to the Eraring coal-fired power station by locking on to the coal conveyors. Eraring is Australia’s most polluting coal-fired power station and is responsible for 13% of Australia’s greenhouse pollution. The old and inefficient plant sends nearly 20 million tonnes of greenhouse pollution into the atmosphere every year. Each hour the coal supply is blockaded, prevents 2,000 tonnes of CO2 being released. As the government’s climate change advisor, Ross Garnaut, prepares to deliver his draft review in Canberra, Greenpeace calls for urgent action on climate change. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd must deliver policies that upscale renewable energy and start replacing dirty coal-fired power.
Why this matters.
We resist. Weakly, inadequately, but we resist.
What happened next?
The power station is finally being decommissioned. (Not much) better late than never.
On this day, 2nd July 2007, the highly-principled Guy Pearse (not the actor) released his brilliant book “High and Dry”.
“A Liberal Party member and former ministerial speechwriter issues a book today which depicts the Prime Minister with a stranglehold on environmental policy, deliberately surrounding himself with climate change sceptics.”
Rudra, N. 2007. Liberal attacks PM on climate. Canberra TImes, 2 July.
The problem was that High and Dry was soon “outdated,” when the Liberals were swept from office in late 2007. Pearse wrote a cracking Quarterly Essay about what Labor was up to, published in 2009.
HOWEVER the book is well-written, well-researched and gives you names and tactics of the “Greenhouse Mafia.”
The book still stands as an example of how you
Do a PhD
Turn a PhD into a book (a different beast)
Make an impact, behave with integrity.
Why this matters.
Names are named, repertoires exposed. This is how you are supposed to do intellectual work.
On this day in 2000, the beserk but effective “Lavoisier Group” of Australian climate denialists schmoozed senior politicians (former Treasurer Peter Walsh, an ALP thumper, probably set this up).
The Lavoisier Group (named for a French chemist, because these groups are always – somewhat pathetically – trying to bolster their cred and signal their, ah, “erudition”) had been formed as a radical flank effort to try to stiffen John Howard’s resolve in keeping Australia from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. (Australia had, by various means, gotten a sweet sweet deal of an emissions “reduction” target of [checks notes] … a 10% INCREASE in emissions – see Clive Hamilton on this.]
“Last year, the Lavoisier Group held meetings around the country, including a June 27 dinner for a select group of federal parliamentarians in the House of Representatives’ dining room.”
Small groups of determined and well-connected people who are going to help other people stay rich can be surprisingly effective in blocking things. Who knew.
What happened next?
Lavoisier kept on being effective for as long as Howard was PM (though things got trickier for them by 2006 or so). They were an important building block for the climate denial “movement” that flourished from 2009 or so through to 2013 or so. They are still, bless them, publishing their idiocies.
On this day, June 26 in 1991, Australian journalist Maria Taylor gave a good example of how the wave of climate concern that had begun in 1988/9 was ending.(they always do).
STATE OF THE WORLD 1991. A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. Allen and Unwin. $19.95.
Reviewer: MARIA TAYLOR
A SYDNEY marketing man and sometime advisor to the environmental movement told me recently that these days it’s hard to sell business on sponsoring environmental projectsbecause “environment is not the flavour of the month any more”.
While sheer survival may top many a corporate agenda at the moment, it’s still a breathtakingly quaint notion to suppose that “the environment” is a media beat-up begun a year or so ago and now about run its course.
The implication is that just as soon as we can get the economy to behave again, it will be back to business as usual. A lot of people also believe in fairy tales….
The “Issue Attention Cycle” is a thing. You can think it is stupid, but that doesn’t change its thing-ness, and your need to think carefully about what you do within it to be able to keep doing things after it.
What happened next?
Maria Taylor wrote a PhD thesis. A good one It became this book: Global warming and climate change: what Australia knew and buried. You can read it here
On this day, June 21 2007, in the midst of one of the periodic waves of public agitation about climate change, the Australian Broadcast Corporation launched “Carbon Cops.” No I haven’t watched it. This website is enough of a wrist-slasher to manage, without subjecting myself to this sort of futile censorious neoliberal Calvinistic horror.
“Carbon cops Lish Fejer and Sean Fitzgerald are on a mission to change habits of Australian families by measuring their carbon emissions.”
TV shows on global warming leave most viewers cold. Carbon Cops may change that, writes Michael Dwyer.
WHAT if our planet was under siege by some omnipotent celestial foe, but television stations were unable to acquire footage compelling enough to galvanise the required response?
That appears to be the inconvenient truth confronting green TV shows. In a medium that thrives on explosive hits, the merely smouldering issue of global warming is proving about as gripping as watching trees grow.
This year we’ve already seen two well-intentioned environmental awareness shows come and go – or rather we haven’t, judging by the ratings for SBS’ Eco House Challenge and Channel Ten’s Cool Aid: The National Carbon Test.
Now the ABC braves the precarious balance between worthy and watchable with a six-part domestic challenge series titled – with an admirable lunge for some of that hot, sci-fi/CSI intrigue – Carbon Cops.
God, this sort of preachy atomised and atomising scolding shite, that makes people feel guilty about relative trivialities, and hails them as consumers but never as citizens, is part of the reason we are so doomed. We need people who cut their own carbon footprints but who spend most of their time and energy expanding their political footprints and those of other people who give a damn. That requires functioning social movement organisations that don’t fall over (implode) the first time something goes wrong.
On this day, June 18, 2008, the Australian Federal Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, introduced a Carbon Capture and Storage bill into the Australian parliament. [The draft legislation had been unveiled in May 2008]. See here for a good account of the introduced legislation.
Because, you know, carbon capture and storage is definitely a real response to a real problem, not a fantasy of techno-salvationism that will keep us from doing what we actually need to do.
The context is that the previous government, of John Howard, had tolerated loose talk of carbon capture and storage as a way of deflecting concerns about climate change. With the arrival of Kevin Rudd, from Queensland (where they dig up and burn a lotta coal), the CCS thing kicked into higher gear, with an alliance of the producers, the coal union (the CFMEU) and even a couple of NGOs (looking at you, WWF and the now-defunct Climate Institute).
Some of my earliest Conversation articles were about this stuff. This one, co-written with the wonderful Christopher Wright, is worth a look –
Time and money we spend on CCS is time and money we don’t spend on retooling an economy and a society to use a LOT less.
But, also, CCS was our only shot, given that the world is going to continue to burn absurd amounts of fossil fuels. Both these statements can be true at the same time. We’re toast.
What happened next?
CCS fell in a heap in Australia by the end of 2010. It gets reheated occasionally, for political reasons. Chevron’s Gorgon facility is not working. Did I mention we’re toast?
