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 there were fierce debates within America about what “paths” should be taken, nuclear, coal, solar, etc. And this is just a cracking cartoon that does a really useful piece of work in explaining what’s going on.
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.
Jan 21 Trump Makes it Official: No-one is coming to save us – showing that it “you’re on your own “ using a quote from Jesse Keenan – see also this one.
Steffen, who came up with the term predatory delay, is good at compassionately addressing people’s disorientation and inability to do themselves a sitrep, (though he doesn’t use those phrases.)
And the crucial point is that things are accelerating, and therefore OODA Loops are being hacked, not just by actual enemies, but by events. There’s that famous quote that I use too much from Walt Benjamin about the Klee painting – this wreckage that piles up at our feet, we call it progress.
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
I’m in this sense of disorientation, alienation, things moving too fast has been going on since sort of the joint processes of the massive urbanization and industrialization of the early 19th century, in the coming of “modernity.” See also “the hypertrophy of objective culture” by ol’ Georgie Simmel.
It goes back before then, of course, it’s never as if there wasn’t changes, as Steffen himself very clearly articulates,
These really valuable 10 or 12 minute podcast. It’s a good format (see also Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American). Doesn’t outstay its welcome.
Steffen has useful things to say, and he says them well. He’s good on this question of, you know, being “optimistic”, and distinguishes it from hope and hopium . He points out that he grew up in the 70s and 80s, (as did I), with all of this sense of, you know, “the 100th monkey” bollocks and global change in consciousness.
And Steffen doesn’t think that’s going to happen, but he also doesn’t think we’re all going to die next Tuesday. And he makes an interesting point that in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, there was such massive destruction, dislocation, millions murdered, but life went on and things got better.
Hmmm I mean, you could argue that’s because large parts of the world were physically untouched, especially the United States and Australia, and that food was not or the availability of food globally was not a concern.
We shall see what happens if we make it to the 2030s and 2040s in some kind of shape. But I do think that there is a non-trivial – I’m not saying it’s large – but it’s a non trivial chance of generalized sort of well, for want of a better term, “generalised global societal collapse.”
And then, of course, this question of “What do you mean by that word collapse?” Because it covers everything from the Great Depression through to Mad Max apocalypse.
Anyway, look, these podcasts by Steffen are worth your time.
On this day, 9 years ago, yet another promise of imminent “low emissions technologies” was made…
2014 INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP TO DEVELOP LOW EMISSION TECHNOLOGIES Statement from Brendan Pearson, Chief Executive, Minerals Council of Australia The Minerals Council of Australia today announced the establishment of an industry-led Leadership Roundtable for the development of Low Emissions Technologies for Fossil Fuels. The Roundtable will be chaired by Mr Stewart Butel, Managing Director of Wesfarmers Resources Limited, Chair of COAL21* and a Director of the Minerals Council of Australia. Membership will include senior representatives from the coal, oil and gas, and power generation industries, research organisations, federal and state governments and the Global CCS Institute.The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 400ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that although Tony Abbott was now Prime Minister (though not for much longer, it turned out!), the fossil industry still felt the need to say the right things.
What I think we can learn from this
Endless promises. It would be funny if it were not tragi.
What happened next
The usual – nothing substantive.
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 the 19th of April 2002, the chair of the IPCC, Bob Watson failed to get a second term as chair, even though he wanted one, and (almost) everyone else wanted him to have it.
“At a plenary session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Robert Watson, a British-born US atmospheric scientist who has been its chairman since 1996, was replaced by an Indian railway engineer and environmentalist, R K Pachauri.
Dr Pachauri received 76 votes to Dr Watson’s 49 after a behind-the-scenes diplomatic campaign by the US to persuade developing countries to vote against Dr Watson, according to diplomats. The British delegation argued for Dr Watson and Dr Pachauri to share the chairmanship.
The US campaign came to light after the disclosure of a confidential memorandum from the world’s biggest oil company, Exxon-Mobil, to the White House, proposing a strategy for his removal.”
tt’s an example of how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change works – the word to look for is governmental.
Why this matters.
We’re not getting the politics- free science, which the denialists say they want. We’re getting the science that has been deemed acceptable to the politicians who are often little more than Meat Puppets for vested interests.
And this is a very, very familiar story.
What happened next?
The IPCC has kept going. The message hasn’t changed. Except the time horizons keep shrinking (have shrunk to nowt).
On this day in 2001, George “Dubya” Bush, recently selected as President by the Supreme Court, backed away from a promise to cut emissions he had made on the campaign trail.
,He sends a letter to Senator Jesse Helms and other awful human beings saying that’s what he’s gonna do. This is part of Bush’s awful behaviour at the guidance of Dick Cheney and other turds in the Republican Party, and thanks to their perceived short term self interest, and they thought that the climate problem was illusory or whatever. Here’s stuff from Malto Mildenberger‘s “Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics“, which you should read if you’re into all this stuff…
Why this matters.
“We” coulda fixed this – or at least slowed things down to give our wisdom time to catch up with our knowledge. “We” didn’t.
What happened next?
Bush pulled out of Kyoto shortly after this, and Kyoto limped on, becoming law because the Russians wanted membership of the WTO. Kyoto was ultimately replaced by a “Pledge and Review”.
On this day in March 4 2003, the Luntz memo was exposed. Frank Luntz was a Republican communications PR guru, and his memo advocated continued casting of doubt.
In the words of the Guardian’s reporter
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,” Mr Luntz writes in the memo, obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based campaigning organisation.”
The broader context is that the Bush administration having already reneged on promises to reduce carbon dioxide and pulled the US out of Kyoto needed to continue its perception management, and that’s what Luntz was proposing, as part of the broader war, to keep people in the dark, ignorant, confused, demoralised and it’s been a very successful effort. So here we are.
Why this matters.
We need to see how “common sense” (in the Gramscian sense) is endlessly confected and defended…
On this day in 2010, Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, gave testimony to a parliamentary committee (the Science and Technology Select Committee since you ask) on the subject of the so-called Climategate hack (or the “Climatic Research Unit email controversy”).
In late 2009, in the run up to Copenhagen, the servers of the University of East Anglia had been infiltrated, a vast archive of emails downloaded, and then selected releases to make it look as if climate scientists were colluding to keep critics out of peer review. And this was designed to make the negotiations at Copenhagen COP more problematic. Whether it mattered or not is impossible, perhaps to say, but no single bullet ever wins a war…
The broader context is that climate scientists had been coming under fierce public attack since at least 1989. (Never mind James Hansen’s funding being pulled in 1981 because of a New York Times front page article displeasing the Republican Administration).
But the kind of personal, bitter ad hominem attacks really took off 1995-96 around the second IPCC assessment report. Michael Mann, who became the subject of attacks himself, calls this the Serengeti Strategy.
Why this matters.
The narrative of “there is doubt about how severe climate change will be/the climate scientists may be – if not lying – exaggerating” is an immensely powerful narrative. Because it allows middle class professional people to continue not to pay attention to the issue. And that’s why the predatory delayers have played the card for so long.
What happened next?
The “climategate” emails were found, after multiple investigations, to be – in the words of the right wingers – a “nothing burger.” Jones continued his career, having admitted that he had contemplated suicide at the time. Meanwhile, the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have continued to climb
Atmospheric C02 concentration at that time: 390.1ppm
Atmospheric C02 concentration at time of publication: 416.71ppm
On this day, eight years ago, Peabody Coal started an advertising campaign called “Advanced Energy for Life.” Because as the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal had a serious image problem, and therefore needed to conflate itself with notions of energy poverty.
Why this matters
What they’re trying to do when they do this is insinuate that anyone who is opposed to the burning of ever more coal somehow wants people in Africa to die young, after a miserable impoverished life.
What you’ll find, of course, is that the many of same people who are protesting about environment also would like debt relief (cancellation), democratisation technology transfer and all the rest of it.
But Peabody would rather have you believe that all environmentalists are racist Malthusian assholes all the time. Now, it is indisputable that some environmentalists historically and down into this present day, racist assholes, and explicitly and unashamedly others, confused or ignorant, and of course, most buy into the myths of it being possible to have everything for everyone and there being no trade offs.
What happened next
One of Australia’s briefer Prime Ministers, Tony Abbott, used the “coal is good for humanity” line when opening a coal-fired power station later that year.
Peabody is making money at the mo’, because gas prices have spiked and so coal is competitive. For now.
I’d recommend an article by James Meek in the London Review of Books about Scottish offshore wind energy and who is building the towers and the kits and under what conditions. But I digress.
What happened next
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s later that year when opening a coal mine, use one of the Peabody talking points. Coal is good for humanity. So that’s When for pee buddies, PR people,
Peabody has, of course, entered bankruptcy proceedings chapter 11, I think. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not that some people aren’t making money. It just means that times are tough for call my heart’s bleeding.
On 25th of February 1992 20 business associations from nine different countries try to slow down progress towards the impending Rio Earth Summit agreements by predicting economic calamity and doom: the same old story.
1992 On 25 February at UN headquarters (New York City, USA), 20 business associations from 9 countries released a joint statement to the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change….
Anon. 1992. International Business Associations Issue Statement on Climate Negotiations. Global Environmental Change. Vol. 4, No. 5 13 March.
You will be shocked, shocked to learn that Australian business interests were in that mix – “The business associations, nearly half of which are from Australia, are in the fields of fossil fuel and energy production, manufacturing, and metals.”
Why this matters
We need to remember that whenever governments and state institutions are forced to consider the long-term well-being of constituents/future generations, there will be short termist vested interests pushing in the opposite direction. That’s just the way it is.
What happened next
A weakened Earth Summit. Treaty text was put forward, not entirely due to business interest, but also the US administration of George HW Bush in June of 1992. This was then ratified and then gave us the COPs for climate and biodiversity. Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide accumulates, the biodiversity collapse accelerates. And to young folk out there, I’m sorry. We old fuckers, we blew it. You have every right to feel betrayed and gaslit let down by your parents and your grandparents
The business associations? They’re singing differently, but the song remains the same…
On this day in 2006 Australian academic Clive Hamilton gave a speech in an Australian country town called Adelaide. In it he named his “dirty dozen” of polluters who were preventing climate action. The list included South Australian Senator Nick Minchin, Prime Minister John Howard, journalists and business figures.
Hamilton was, at that time one of scandalously few academics trying to talk about we’re one of the few academics trying to talk about the capture of the Australian state by fossil interests. He had also co-edited a volume called “Silencing Dissent.”
There was no comeback to his speech. Nobody sued.
Why this matters
For a long time, from the early 90s through to the mid-2000s, climate change – and especially resistance to climate policy – was a very very niche area. There really were not that many people trying to keep tabs on who was slowing down what, and how.
What happened next
The Dirty Dozen continued to be dirty. The moment of concern was hijacked and wasted. Australia has had an horrific time of it with climate policy, gridlock and mayhem. Carpe the diems.
