Categories
anti-reflexivity Australia Carbon Pricing Denial

March 5, 2011 – Australian “wingnuts are coming out of the woodwork”

Twelve years ago, on this day, March 5, 2011 veteran Australian political commentator Laurie Oakes nailed the climate denialist nutters.

“Wingnuts are coming out of the woodwork. The mad and menacing phone calls to independent MP Tony Windsor are just one indication. There are plenty of others online. The carbon tax and Tony Abbott’s call for a people’s revolt have crazies foaming at the mouth. You see it on the ‘Revolt Against the Carbon Tax’ Facebook page, for example. Like this message from a Gillard-hater about a rally in front of Parliament House being planned for March 23: ‘Just like Egypt we stay there and protest continuously until she and her cronies, Bob Brown Greens etc are ousted! We have got to get rid of this Godless mistress of deceit.”’

Oakes, L. 2011. Loonies latch on to the politics of hate. The Australian, 5 March.

Oakes, 2013: 86

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 392.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was an incredibly heated culture war that had been constructed around the question of having a price on carbon emissions. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott had had multiple positions on carbon pricing and climate change (the Howard government had gone to the 2007 election with such a policy). Abbott admitted to being a weather vane n the issue

By March 2011 he had seen off Kevin Rudd and had been reportedly willing to sell his ass to become Prime Minister. In February 2011 Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard had announced that there would be an emissions trading scheme with a fixed price for two years. And as oaks puts it, all the wingnuts came out to play…

What I think we can learn from this

That settler colonies don’t deal well with the notion of environmental limits especially if someone who is only a woman is in charge.

That it is partly possible to import culture war techniques from the United States. They won’t work perfectly in other countries, but for a while, they give the appearance of effectiveness. 

You also want to think about McCright and Dunlap 2011, anti reflexivity as part of the picture underneath all of this.

What happened next

Well, on the 23rd of March, there was the infamous rally with Abbott being photographed next to placards that talked about “Bob Brown’s Bitch” and “Ditch the Witch ”. The wingnuts kept coming out to play but with less than less efficacy. It’s not just left wing groups that suffer from burnout and emotacycles.

Abbott got the opportunity to show the world what a smart and effective leader he could be from September 2013.  “Oops” doesn’t begin to cover it.

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.

Categories
Agnotology anti-reflexivity Denial United States of America

March 4, 2003 – “Luntz memo” exposes Bush climate strategy 

Twenty years ago, on this day, March 4, 2003, President Bush’s greenwash strategy was revealed in all its steaming glory 

The memo, by the leading Republican consultant Frank Luntz, concedes the party has “lost the environmental communications battle” and urges its politicians to encourage the public in the view that there is no scientific consensus on the dangers of greenhouse gases.

“The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.”

Burkeman, O. 2003. Memo Exposes Bush’s New Greenwash StrategyThe Guardian, March 4

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 376.6ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was  that George Bush was clearly not going to do anything about climate change. It’s not clear that Al Gore, who actually won the  2000 presidential election, would have either, but there you are. So it became a question of how to position the issue. So-called “perception management.” And the Luntz memo basically says, 

What I think we can learn from this

The battle for the control of the public mind is a never-ending battle. (Or rather, the propagandisation and the attempts to combat it, so that we can have a public sphere not dominated by rich vested interests, is never-ending). And as reality, physical reality, impinges more and more, you’re gonna find more and more people spewing propaganda and more and more people and this is the crux, wanting to believe it. So, this is not brainwashing against resistance. This is going with the grain.

What happened next

Luntz sort of kind of recanted ,in 2019

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/21/frank-luntz-wrong-climate-change-1470653

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..

Categories
Denial Industry Associations International processes UNFCCC United Nations United States of America

February 27, 1992 – climate denialists continue their effective and, ah, well EVIL, work

Thirty one years ago, on this day, February 27, 1992, denialists released a denial statement during what were supposed to be the last negotiations before the “Earth Summit”, the one where a text was supposed to be agreed that could then lock-in the attendance of Prime Ministers and Leaders…

In February 1992 the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) published the “Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming” objecting to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Earth Summit planned for Rio de Janiero in June 1992.[1]

The signatories to the letter complained that the Earth Summit “aims to impose a system of global environmental regulations, including onerous taxes on energy fuels, on the population of the United States and other industrialized nations. Such policy initiatives derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. They are based on the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action. We do not agree.” 

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SEPP_and_the_Statement_by_Atmospheric_Scientists_on_Greenhouse_Warming

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 357.2ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

The climate negotiations were coming to a crunch. The whole thing might fall over. The US administration, with George Bush senior as the boss, was blocking blocking blocking, but there was always the fear they might – with a US Presidential election pending – make concessions. The denialists wanted to make that more unlikely by making it more costly….

What I think we can learn from this

Those fearful of change will keep pushing even if “their guy” (and it usually is a guy) is ‘rock solid’.  They take little/nothing for granted. That attitude, and all their money, and their structural position within the economy, explains why they win so often…

What happened next

Bush held firm. The French blinked on the question of targets and timetables for emissions reductions in the climate treaty. There were extra “negotiations” in May in New York, but they were just really a white flag being run up. Everyone went to Rio for a grip and grin.

The following 30 years have been about trying to claw back a mechanism by which rich countries would actually cut emissions.
It was never going to be easy, but the Bush Whitehouse rendered it actually impossible.

Am so very very glad I did not breed, because I’d have had to try to teach my kid a whole bunch of survival skills for a shituation whose particular needs are pretty impossible to specify.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
Activism anti-reflexivity Australia Cultural responses Denial

February 22, 2013 – Idiotic “Damage” astroturf attempted by miners

Ten years ago, on this day, February 22, 2013, some miners went ape, setting up a ludicrous front organisation. Brain-damage indeed.

A Goldfields lobby group is planning to launch an eleventh hour campaign against what it calls “green extremists”.

The group DAMAGE, Dads And Mums Against Green Extremists, is planning advertisements in a Kalgoorlie newspaper in the last week of the state election campaign

Anon, 2013  Goldfields lobby group opposing ‘green extremistsABC. 22 February.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 397ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

Western Australia is heavily dependent – in every sense – on mining.  Anything that gets between the miners and their cash is regarded as something to be ignored, then smeared and repressed, by any means necessary.

What I think we can learn from this

Sometimes the goon squad tries to develop a sense of humour, as it did with this retronym. It’s usually not very funny though, more pitiable and embarrassing.

And smearing people who think a habitable planet in years to come is a nice idea as “extremists” is, well, an old ploy.

But, you know, sometimes it goes all step on a rake/Streisand effect.

What happened next

The Libs won the 2013 State election. 

But the Greens?  The Greens were glad of the attempted “damage” to their brand. As one their MPs Robin Chapple said after the election

“I thank Tim Hall, the Greens candidate for the seat of Kalgoorlie. In Kalgoorlie, I also thank an organisation called Dads And Mums Against Green Extremists. DAMAGE was set up specifically to target the Greens, but in fact it helped to retain our vote by focusing on the Greens and identifying some of the issues it stands for. Many years ago former federal member of Parliament Michael Beahan told me that if your opposition is invisible, the worst thing you can do is identify them. Until the establishment of DAMAGE, the Greens to a large degree had been invisible in the Kalgoorlie media. But in the last two to three weeks of the election, the Greens were front and centre in the media and retained its vote. Michael Beahan’s point was that if somebody is not grabbing the attention, do not highlight them, but DAMAGE did exactly that.” 

https://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/Hansard/hansard.nsf/0/1fbe4e6dd9479fbb48257b8a00135769/$FILE/C39%20S1%2020130611%20p1133c-1142a.pdf

The cultures of extractivism? They continue.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
Australia Denial

February 16, 2007 – Liberals say climate is a “mass panic”

Sixteen  years ago, on this day, February 16, 2007, as the second big wave of climate awareness was kicking off in Australia, a senior Liberal politician was… being himself.

 It SHOULD not be seen as a sin to be cautious about the science of global warming, a senior Federal Government minister has warned.

Finance Minister Nick Minchin says “there remains an ongoing debate about the extent of climate change” and the extent of human activity’s role in global warming.

Murphy, K. 2007. Lib scorns mass ‘panic’ on climate. The Age, February 16 http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/lib-scorns-mass-panic-on-climate/2007/02/16/1171405441792.html

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

Nick Minchin had been successful in defeating an emissions trading scheme in the year 2000. And he had remained one of John Howard’s staunch culture warriors on the question of climate. From late 2006 people in Australia started to become reawakened to the climate problem and Minchin was pushing back in the way that old white men so often do. By this I mean pointing the finger at people and calling them hysterical and accusing them of panicking without bothering to think that maybe there is something to panic about. 

What I think we can learn/remember from this

Just a reminder that just because someone is “successful” does not mean they cannot be a harmful dolt.

The sorts of things that Minchin accuses others of doing – cherry picking data, being unscientific – that’s all projection, that’s what he’s doing.

There are always old white men who will come out with this bullshit and of course now they’ve painted themselves into a corner and would have to admit that they had been wrong which would be psychologically devastating for them.

What happened next

Labor won the Federal election at the end of the year and fundamentally bollocksed up the politics and policy.  Well done, Kevin. You’re from Queensland and you’re here to really screw things up.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
Denial

 February 2, 1996 – denialist sprays #climate science with his bullshit

Twenty seven years ago, on this day, February 2, 1996, denialist idiot Fred Singer wrote to the journal Science…

“Then Fred Singer launched an attack. In a letter to Science on February 2, 1996, four months before formal release of the Working Group 1 Report, Singer presented a litany of complaints.”

Oreskes and Conway, 2010 Page 205

and

In a letter to Science magazine (February 2, 1996) S. Fred Singer charged that the most recent IPCC assessment “presents selected facts and omits important information.”

Gelbspan, R. (1998)  Page 227

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 362ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

The denialists – both those who were lying for money and those who were lying to themselves, also for money – were fighting a rearguard action against inconvenient reality. The second Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change synthesis report was being released. It said that there was already a discernible impact from human activities on the climate. This was anathema to the denialists, because it would then lead to pressure for real regulation. 

By now, of course, the Berlin mandate (agreed at COP1 in Berlin in 1995) was underway, meaning that rich nations were being compelled to negotiate an agreement on emissions cuts. 

What I think we can learn from this

In order to avoid outcomes they don’t like, denialists will attack scientists and smear them. This is more widely recognized now.. One form of these attacks is now known as the Serengeti Strategy, a term coined by Michael Mann, a climate scientist who would be attacked from 1998 for his “hockey stick”.

What happened next

The attacks on scientists continued and culminated in 2009, with the theft of emails from the UEA server. The selective release and cherry-picking of the emails were part of a largely successful effort to sow doubt and confusion in the minds of people who might otherwise have mattered, or who may have done things that mattered.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
Denial Interviews

Of the long 1970s, non-inevitable oil company denialism and “nanobubbles”: interview with Prof Cyrus Mody

One of the reasons I have continued with All Our Yesterdays is because there are definitely lots of smart activists and academics out there doing great work who deserve a signal boost and the chance to cross-fertilise. One such person is Prof. Cyrus Mody… who kindly agreed to this interview. (If you read Dutch, check out this interview too).

1) Who are you and how did you come to be working on the 1970s Oil Industry from a perch in Netherlands?

I’m an historian of science and technology at Maastricht University. A lot of my research wanders into business history, environmental history, energy history – but my PhD is in Science and Technology Studies, and I approach all my research from the direction of science and technology. That’s perhaps my main contribution as a scholar – to get historians of science to think more about business, and to get business, environmental, and energy historians to think more about science (and to get all of them to think more about technology). Until recently, I was making those points mostly with respect to fields related to the microelectronics industry – fields like semiconductor physics, electrical engineering, nanotechnology, materials science. But in the course of that research (and in reading the secondary literature on similar science-oriented industries such as biotechnology) I noticed that the oil industry was absolutely everywhere in high-tech (and yet hardly anyone had pointed out that ubiquity). So around 2012 I started preliminary work on the project that became Managing Scarcity and Sustainability by trying to map all the “spillovers” from the oil industry into other high-tech domains that I could find.

At the time I was at Rice University in Houston – a great place to do oil history and energy humanities, and a wonderful place to be an untenured assistant professor because I had a lot of freedom to teach what I wanted and enough resources for the kind of research I was doing at the time. But I could see that I couldn’t study all the oil spillovers I was uncovering on my own – that would require becoming an expert in the history of too many fields, each of which deserved its own study. For reasons I won’t go into, at Rice I was never going to be able to put together the kind of team needed to tackle this topic. But in the Netherlands, team projects are common. It wasn’t an easy decision to move, but in doing so I’m now surrounded by a much more vibrant local/regional history of science and technology and STS community than I was in Houston, and I’ve been able to hire an incredible team (Odinn Melsted, Jelena Stankovic, and Michiel Bron) to work on Managing Scarcity.

2)  Tell us about , “Managing Scarcity and Sustainability: The Oil Industry, Environmentalism, and Alternative Energy in the Age of Scarcity.” – what is the project, and how might it help us understand what is going on now?

Managing Scarcity and Sustainability (https://managingscarcity.com/) is a five-year project funded by the NWO (usually translated as Dutch Research Council; award VI.C.191.067). Our main focus is oil actors’ involvement in the global debate about resource scarcity, environmentalism, and sustainable growth/development in the “long 1970s” (which we usually define as the years 1968 to 1986). By “oil actors” we mean, firstly, oil firms as well as allied firms and trade associations; but we also mean individual oil executives and scientists and engineers with oil industry experience, as well as the firms (e.g., solar energy start-ups) and organizations (e.g., philanthropic foundations) that those individuals led.

The project is sort of two-pronged: on the one hand, we look at the technologies that oil firms (and the start-ups they invested in) developed in response to growing awareness of resource scarcity and environmental problems. Here, we’re mainly interested in solar, geothermal, and nuclear (both fission and fusion) energy as well as auxiliary technologies such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology; but we’re also trying to draw in researchers who are studying other oil spillovers, e.g., wind energy or fuel cells and advanced batteries. The oil industry was deeply involved in lots of alternative energy in this period, but pulled back (in many cases, abandoned) those investments in the 1980s.

The other prong looks at a network of current and former oil executives who stoked the global debate on resource scarcity, environmental problems (including climate change), and sustainable development. At the center of that network were: Robert O. Anderson (chair of both Atlantic Richfield – a mid-size oil company – and the Aspen Institute, as well as donor to many other environmental organizations and think tanks); Maurice Strong (a Canadian diplomat, chair of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development, but also an executive or board member with various oil companies including Ajax, Dome, Petro-Canada, and Tosco); and George Mitchell (often known as the “father of fracking” but also the sponsor of a series of Limits to Growth conferences and other environmental/sustainable development activities). Through collaboration with the Club of Rome, the United Nations, the Nobel Foundation, and an array of think tanks, this network was incredibly influential in the emergence of institutions of global environmental governance from the 1970s until the early 1990s.

What can we learn from this? Well, first, that climate denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable. All across the oil industry in the 1970s executives were publicly saying that we would need to rely more on non-fossil fuels: nuclear fission in the short term, geothermal in the medium term, and nuclear fusion and solar in the long term (by which they meant after the year 2000). And their companies invested accordingly. We’ve also known for a while that oil firms were aware of climate change in this period; but members of the Anderson-Strong-Mitchell network weren’t just aware of it, they were some of the loudest voices in the world drawing attention to it and calling for global governance structures to address it. Which means, second, that we have to look for a more complex explanation for why denialism became a more common strategy from the late 1980s onward. Our working hypothesis is that the declining price of oil meant these firms had less cash to invest for the long term. But, perhaps more importantly, the election of neoliberal regimes in the US, UK, Netherlands, Canada, and elsewhere meant those firms could no longer rely on the state as a partner in development of both alternative energy and climate regulation. Neoliberalism also encouraged hostile takeover bids by people like T. Boone Pickens, which forced oil firms both to liquidate assets in order to fend off those bids, and also to refocus on their “core competency” of getting oil out of the ground in order to assure investors that their main priority would be short-term returns rather than responsible long-term development of alternatives.

3) What is the “nanobubbles” project? What inspired it, what has it achieved, what next?

NanoBubbles is a large project funded by the European Research Council’s Synergy program (award 951393). We are a couple dozen researchers across more than a half-dozen universities in the Netherlands and France, drawn from history, sociology, philosophy, library science, computer science, nanoscience, STS, and other fields. The aim is to better understand the difficulties that scientists face in attempting to correct the scientific record, and also to study the systemic inducements to exaggeration, defense of erroneous claims, and even outright fraud in science. Some members of the group have personally experienced damaging repercussions from their attempts to correct errors in the scientific record; others have developed tools and approaches for studying some of the channels through which errors propagate (e.g., journal articles). My own interest stems in part from my earlier work on nanotechnology and in part from my current work (within Managing Scarcity) on climate denialism and on the oil industry’s inflation of “bubbles” in high-tech fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence. We’re about 18 months into the project, a lot of which was spent on hiring people and getting our infrastructure in place (e.g., ethics protocols), so our achievements thus far are mostly preparatory to what comes next; but I’d point you to work by some members of the project (Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and colleagues) on “tortured phrases” as an example of what we’re working on (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02134-0). Ultimately, at least in the Maastricht corner of the project (i.e., myself, Candida Sanchez Burmester, and Max Rossman), we’d like to do both traditional, labor-intensive qualitative research (participant observation at labs and conferences, historical research at archives) and also develop automated tools for scaling up qualitative research to much larger Ns in order to better understand how claims and counter-claims do or don’t circulate through (and gain traction within) scientific communities.

4) What do you think the main thing academics/politicians/activists/citizens need to understand/do differently around energy to help us miss our climate targets by a smaller margin than we otherwise would?

Well, energy and climate are too complex to point to a single “main thing.” But the lessons I’d draw from Managing Scarcity and NanoBubbles are these: denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable, and at one point a significant portion of the oil industry was working toward some kind of transition in both technology and governance; oil firms bear plenty of blame for their later support of denialism, but there are other actors (particularly neoliberal politicians and economists as well as the financial industry) who bear lots of blame too (and if we only address the oil industry but not those other actors we’ll never actually resolve the core issues); but even if some oil actors of the 1970s (people like Strong and Anderson) were moving in a more positive direction than that of their successors, their program was still too oriented to technological solutionism and economic growth; instead, we need an approach that prioritizes cultural change over (though not necessarily exclusive of) technological innovation, and that is willing to entertain alternatives to economic growth.

Categories
Australia Denial

December 27, 1989 – Greenhouse effect = “socialist hokum”

On this day, December 27 in 1989 the Canberra Times reported that a Queensland mining chief  had called the greenhouse effect  “socialist hokum”,

Mussared, D. (1989) Global Warming The Evidence The Canberra Times  Wednesday 27 December 1989, page 32 

I’ve not been able to find the name of this clown, or the date, but it will have happened at some point in 1988 or more likely 1989.

See also August 15, 1989 – Queenslander mayor says the greenhouse effect is like“a bird urinating in the Tweed River while in flight”

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 353ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this – 

By 1989 “The Greenhouse Effect,” as Global Warming/Climate Change was briefly known, was ‘everywhere’ in the media (to be bumped only by the build-up to the First Gulf War, from August 1990.)

Why this matters. 

The point is this – we all assess new things in the world through various lenses – of what seems ‘right’, what fits our cosmology. If there is something like “the greenhouse effect”, which implies things we have always thought of as Good (more cheap energy) might have downsides, or presents a problem that is going to upset our way of life, then of COURSE we look for ways to dismiss it. That’s who we are.  And an entire industry of professionals has built up to make this easier rather than harder to do.

What happened next?

Queensland got megarich from selling coal, both thermal and metallurgical (or rather, some people – in and beyond Queensland –  got rich. Others, not so much).

Categories
Denial Kyoto Protocol United States of America

December 26, 1997 – #climate denial machine exposed again and again

On this day, December 26 in 1997, the doubt and denial machine that was sharpening its talons and running tests on its deadly bullshit spreaders on December 25, 1989 had won a famous victory at Kyoto, lowering ambition, diverting policymaker attention into easily-scammed “emissions trading” and so on.  This was no secret – the mainstream press were perfectly willing to publish articles that laid it out bare. 

“With their protestations of dire economic catastrophe as a result of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, U.S. manufacturers are crying wolf for the second time. The first time was a decade ago in response to the Montreal Protocol, which required a 50 percent cut by 1998 in emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which deplete the earth’s protective ozone layer.”

Arjun Makhijani. A. 1997. Crying Wolf About Kyoto. Washington Post, 26 December.

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 364ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this – 

Between 1989 and 1997, “our” fate was sealed – the final nail in the coffin. We’d ignored scientists warnings about carbon dioxide build-up from the 1950s until 1988 (there really was enough evidence by the late 1970s, as this site has tried to flag). From 1989 to 1992 the US – formal administration and informal government (the corporates) did all it could to stop a climate treaty from happening. Once they lost that battle they switched to making sure the treaty was toothless. In this they succeeded. At the first COP, in Berlin, in 1995, the rest of the world had tried to get some teeth, even if only molars, not incisors, back in the mouth. This was the “Berlin Mandate” which said rich countries should come to Kyoto (the third meeting, in late 1997) with a text to reduce their own emissions.  Uncle Sam said nope, and again, “lost” but really won. 

And here we are.

Why this matters. 

It is not just bad luck that we are where we are. When something could have been done, it wasn’t, because a significant portion of the rich and powerful didn’t want it to, others who could have stopped them within the elites were quiescent and the social movements were outgunned.

What happened next?

The US never ratified the Kyoto Protocol (Australia only did in 2007).  The COP circus has staggered on.  So it goes…

Categories
Denial United States of America

December 25, 1989 – business press pushback about Global Warning “panic” begins…

On this day, December 25 in 1989 the business press ran one of the first (of countless) bullshit articles saying that concern about global warming was a “panic”. 

The usual cherry-picking and getting react quotes from various contrarians, all wrapped up with basic condescension, and  just enough actual facts to make it all seem plausible. 

Am not going to quote from it. Life is (really) too short.

Brookes, W. (1989) “The Global Warming Panic” Forbes, December 25: 96-102

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 351ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this – 

The “pushback” against concern on climate change was growing.  Corporate interests were realising that this was a threat that needed combatting. Outlets like Forbes, read by the CEOs and wanna-be CEOs, needed to provide coherent-seeming, professional seeming pieces, that studiously avoided, oh, any mention of how the atmospheric scientists had been right about ozone, for example.

Why this matters. 

The doubt and denial campaigns began in 1989, and picked up speed. We need to remember that. Those who planned and implemented these should be in front of some international tribunal for crimes against humanity and ecocide. But won’t be, of course.

What happened next?

More nonsense, more “Global Climate Coalition” etc.

See tomorrow’s post…