Thirty years ago, on this day, November 10th, 1994,
Victorians should not rely on the state’s new competitive electricity companies to meet environmental aims, a senior power industry official has warned.
In a paper to be delivered in Sydney today, Dr Harry Schaap says the competitive system that Victoria and Australia are entering will no longer be able to devote so many resources to environmental challenges.
Dr Schaap is the manager of environmental affairs for Generation Victoria, owner of the state’s power stations, and one of two electricity industry representatives on the Council of Australian Governments’ National Greenhouse Advisory Panel. He will speak today at the annual conference of the Electricity Supply Association of Australia.
His comments may focus renewed attention on the possible environmental costs of Victoria’s electricity reforms and coming privatisation.
1994 Walker, D. 1994. Environment May Suffer In New Power Climate – Expert. The Age, 10 November, p.5.
[Faulkner too – see below]
The Federal Minister for the Environment, John Faulkner, has warned the electricity industry that its strides towards greater competitiveness may be working against a better environment, with cheaper prices encouraging consumers to use and waste more energy.
He also raised the threat of environmental levies — which could include a carbon tax — as a method of ensuring the industry cleans up its act.
Senator Faulkner’s speech to the Electricity Supply Association of Australia conference in Sydney on Thursday [10th November] came on the same day as a court challenge by Greenpeace over the construction of a new power station in the Hunter Valley was rejected.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359ppm. As of 2024 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was Australia had ratified the UNFCCC treaty, which was to have its first meeting in Berlin in March of the following year (1995). Federal Environment minister John Faulkner was hoping he could go and boast about a carbon tax. Meanwhile, the electricity system was being privatised, and environmental regulations and goals were being stripped out of the privatisation plans. Of course.
What I think we can learn from this Today’s failures are consequences of failures thirty years previous. Cheerful thought, eh?
What happened next We failed. The carbon tax failed. The electricity system was privatised and emissions from it stayed sky high. Policy did not drive a rapid decarbonisation, which is what was required.
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.
The question is this. Who is the bigger climate criminal – John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia 1996-2007, or Anthony Albanese, same gig from 2022 to ??. It’s not as straightforward as you think.
My answer is below. It’s not clear cut, and I am keen to hear your arguments. In the tweets/replies/comments, etc. Suggested hashtag #HowardOrAlbo
For those to young to remember, and those who have done their best to repress the horror: John Howard did enormous damage to Australia, across a wide range of issues. For these purposes, I’ll stick to climate.
A one paragraph history lesson.
After the shock of the Liberals going to the 1990 Federal election with a stronger emissions reduction target than the ALP, the opponents of meaningful Australian climate action had successfully mobilised in the early 1990s. They prevented any ambitious contribution by Australia to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. They gutted the Ecologically Sustainable Development process initiated by Bob Hawke, Labor Prime Minister from 1983-1991. They stopped any effective action going into the National Greenhouse Response Strategy (December 1992). In all this they were helped by Labor’s Paul Keating, who rolled Hawke in late 1991. In 1994-5 the opponents of climate action, co-ordinated by the Business Council of Australia and what we now know as the Minerals Council of Australia. They laid the groundwork for Australia to plead for “special treatment” internationally, using farcical economic modelling.
Then John Howard came and dialled it all up not to eleven, but to twelve. He doubled down on the economic modelling, which was all horseshit, literally funded by the oil coal and gas companies. He made promises about renewables in order to buy off the worried Liberals, promises he then did everything to avoid keeping. He arm-twisted and bullshitted his way to an incredibly generous deal at Kyoto (and then pulled out, once his mate George W. Bush had led the way). He did everything he could to slow renewables, including organising a meeting of fossil fuel company CEOs to demand their help (I am not making this up). He twice killed off an Emissions Trading Scheme, the second time – in 2003 – against his united cabinet. On and on and on I could go.
Anthony Albanese is worse.
If we can only send one Prime Minister to the International Court of Justice at the Hague it should be loveable raised-in-social-housing Albo.
Here’s my reasoning.
John Howard has two (weak-ish to laughable) arguments in, ah, “mitigation.”
First – he was born in 1939. He was raised to believe that there were no limits to the Earth’s bounty, and that if there WERE limits, well, technology would fix them (1) . He was 30 when the whole eco-doom thing started, and could say “this is a yoof fad”, even while his party, the Liberal Party, created a Minister for the Environment for the first time. I wrote about this in an academic article called “Wind beneath their contempt: Why Australian policymakers oppose solar and wind energy”(Hudson, 2017). There’s a Conversation article about it here.
Second – in the 1990s, even after the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1995-6 it was possible – if you really really engaged in a lot of motivated reasoning – to believe that climate change was mostly a greenie scare designed to create a dreaded Superstate of regulation. The commies had lost the Cold War and were starting a war about Heat to have another go.
It was nonsense, of course it was, but we all believe nonsensical things, occasionally. And so what if some temperature records were falling? Australia is a land of extremes… Dorothea McKellar yadda yadda yadda. Yes, there’s a Millennium Drought (pray for rain, said Howard, in April 2007), but Australia has always had droughts. Howard could grasp some flimsy bullshit climate “doubt.” It had no substance, but it was there.
Finally, in his defence, too at least Howard never pretended to give a rat’s arse. At least he had enough respect to be open in his contempt for the black armbands, the green armbands etc.
Albo has none of that.
Albo was born in 1963. He was 9 when The Limits to Growth came out. Questions of environmental damage and danger were just there for him growing up. He was 20 when the Franklin Dam was saved by his beloved Labor Party. He was 25 when Bob Hawke came over all “green,” when Australia was freaking out about the hole in the Ozone and the Greenhouse Effect.
Albo? How many impossible bushfires? How many killer heatwaves and temperature records smashed? How many incinerated animals? A billion? Two? Are you waiting till the number gets to 5 billion, Albo?
What are you planning as your excuse, in ten years, Albo? I’d really like to know. Oh and, btw, that sound you hear? It’s your old boss, Tom Uren, spinning in his grave.
Whatever your excuse is, it won’t fool anyone. Except maybe you? And maybe in the Alboverse that’s all that matters. Top “leadership”, mate.
Meanwhile, Albo has told us how much he cares. Albo has been making a song and dance about how much he cares for two decades.
The Senate Inquiry into the Energy White Paper has concluded the Energy White Paper will delay critical action on climate change for another twenty years [All Our Yesterdays post here]
And the ALP is forever telling the Greens they are irresponsible (2). Because Labor has suuuuch a good record of following through.
On that subject, a quick digression about one of Albo’s enablers.
Health Minister Mark “The Climate Wars” Butler, sat there like a Trappist monk, watching Albo shit over the portfolio that was his “passion”. Mate your silence is heard. People remember your book, all the lovely words. People hear it and draw conclusions about the quantity and the quality of your sincerity and your courage. You think anyone will be impressed when you mumble something about Caucus rules and Party loyalty? How about some loyalty to the community you claim to represent? The city you are supposed to speak for? How about, I don’t know, even some species loyalty? Mene mene tekel upharsin, eh?
So Howard IS a climate criminal. He should be sitting in the dock by the North Sea. But Albo belongs alongside him, and I think in front of him. Albo has no excuses. Not the excuse of outlook, not knowledge. Albo is the guy in the Kudelka cartoon from last weekend.
Basically, this. As per Richard Denniss’s quotetweet
Australia has relied on rorting rules rather than cutting carbon emissions for decades…
Carbon offsets, carbon capture & storage, clean coal…& now nuclear…any magical future solution can be used to justify subsidising fossil fuel expansion in the present
Yep. This is bipartisan. But the chickens are coming home to roost (or are they among the incinerated billions of animals?) And Australia’s “ambition” is utterly inadequate, as per Bill Hare’s May 2024 Conversation article and Carbon ActionTracker work.
[Btw, the disclaimer at the bottom, in reference to Royce Kurmelovs, applies equally to Dennis and Hare.]
But before you go out and save the world, inquiring minds would like to know – in your opinion – Albo or John Howard? Who is the bigger climate criminal?
Further reading
I have focussed on two “personalities.” There is always the danger of a morality tale, ignoring the awesome power of the networks of determined, clever and remorseless individuals and groups that have played and won the game called “capture the state.” The reading below (especially the Royce Kurmelovs’ book, to be spoken of in the same breath as Guy Pearse’s work) should help with that.
Even Tony Abbott , born 1957, kinda sorta has that excuse (though he and his best mate Malcolm Turnbull are the same age)
I am not now, and never have been a member of the Green Party of anywhere. Or any political party. And as for the Greens, I am not always a fan of how they do bread and butter politics. Here and here. And here, I guess.
DISCLAIMER
I helped Royce with bits of research and we continue to collaborate. For clarity, he had no foreknowledge of this article, nothing to do with it. Same goes for two other ppl whose work I drew on – Richard Dennis’s and Bill Hare. Didn’t consult them in this, no idea if they will applaud or be horrified. My views alone.
Two hundred years ago, on this day, October 21st, 1824, Joseph Aspdin got a patent…
By 1817, he had set up in business on his own in central Leeds. He must have experimented with cement manufacture during the next few years, because on 21 October 1824 he was granted the British Patent BP 5022 entitled An Improvement in the Mode of Producing an Artificial Stone, in which he coined the term “Portland cement” by analogy with the Portland stone,[3] an oolitic limestone that is quarried on the channel coast of England, on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. See below for the text of the patent. [Wikipedia]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 270ishppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Industrial Revolution (not called that at the time!) was in full swing, all sorts of wondrous chemical and physics innovations were happening. often led by empiricists, rather than theoreticians because we didn’t even have an atomic theory of matter at that point, or not one that we liked.
Why this matters is that cement has an astonishing carbon footprint. 8% of global emissions? I haven’t had time to track down a source better than CBS. But ballpark,that seems right-ish] And we’re not going to be net zero if we’re still making lots of things out of steel and cement using current techniques. Whether you can muck around with the clinker or you need CCS, who knows? We’ll find out. My money is that climate change will continue to be an unmitigated disaster.
What happened next we went head over heels in love with cement.
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.
The long-anticipated shift from “climate change is a leftie anti-progress hoax” to “it’s too late to do anything except geo-engineer the planet” is underway.
Speaking on the far-right television programme GB News on Wednesday 16th October s, former Conservative minister Jacob Rees-Mogg on Wednesday 16th October said the following
“When it comes to climate change, most of the public discourse surrounds hair shirt measures to cut emissions and phase out fossil fuels. But is this really where our focus ought to be?
“Perhaps, instead of being obsessed by futile attempts to stop climate change, a goal that’s looking increasingly out of reach, we should turn our attention to the virtues of green technologies and innovative developments to tackle some of the most practical and immediate challenges.”
[continues ad nauseam]
For once failing to meet the award-winning standards for fierce scrutiny, historical awareness and political balance for which GN News is globally respected [yes, that is SARCASM] the journalist in question failed to ask Rees-Mogg the following questions
a) Had he ever peddled climate skepticism (e.g. in a 2013 opinion piece in the Telegraph), despite his political hero Margaret Thatcher having made several ‘time to save the world’ speeches in 1988-1990
b) Had he tried to stop his mate Michael Gove in an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to remove climate change from the National Curriculum.
c) Had he ever tried to stop his former boss, Prime Minister David Cameron from “cutting the green crap” like house insulation, greener transport etc, that would have led to lower bills (and probably lower emissions)
d) Is this not simply a classic ‘reverse-ferret’ – changing position so quickly that everyone will be too busy feeling their head spin to ask obvious questions about intelligence, integrity and the rest of it (that nobody expects from politicians anymore anyway).
The answers are, of course. Yes, no., no, and yes.
This switch from “not happening” to “too late to do anything” is time-honoured, and across many issues. See this 1986 clip from the classic BBC sitcom Yes Prime Minister. “The standard Foreign Office four stage procedure”
It’s been happening around climate, intermittently, since the late 2000s.
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.”
Thirty years ago, on this day, October 2nd, 1994, as the battle for a carbon tax heats up…
THE FRIENDS and enemies of Phillip Toyne, acquired during years of very public struggle over Aboriginal land rights and the environment, were in a stunned state at the ALP’s national conference in Hobart this week.
The news that one of the hardest nosed and most controversial among Australian activists had joined, of all things, the Commonwealth’s environment bureaucracy (at deputy secretary, level, no less), delighted and appalled in equal measure.. …..
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Phillip Toyne had been a thorn in the side of the Hawke government. He, as the chair of the Australian Conservation Foundation, had also done really useful work on Aboriginal land rights. And now he was tempted to try to change the system from within by becoming a senior bureaucrat for John Faulkner, the Federal Environment Minister, who was publicly toying with the idea of introducing a carbon tax.
What we learn is that people who try to change the system from within get sentenced to 20 months or years of boredom. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
What happened next. Toyne was unsuccessful. I don’t know when he quit, but it was pretty clear after February 10 1995, that no meaningful action was going to happen on climate change in Australia, at least not at the federal level. Toyne died in 2015. Having fought the good fight.
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
Can you believe this stuff? Plenty of people can, because they need to…
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 399ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Paris COP – the one that everyone was building as “putting it all back together, (again)” was coming up. And therefore, you get all sorts of business groups trying to gee themselves up and provide cover for the danger of potential regulation. So alongside “We Mean Business”, you’ve got the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, for example.
What we learn is that when there’s a “big event” coming up, you get all sorts of proactive or should I say pre-emptive efforts by business to create bodies that sound cool, and will be quote-worthy, so that journalists who are having to report on potentially-dangerous-to-their-career-stuff have some both-sides-isms quotes tht they can chuck in, for “balance”. You want a for instance? Well like the inability of capitalism to cope with the shit that it is causing. The journos can get a React Quote from some nice-sounding business lobby, rather than just have to state the bare facts that we are doomed and the people doing the dooming don’t give a shit.
It’s also useful for junior policy wonks and rightwing politicians – they can point to these outfits and say soothingly (if only to themselves!) “the system responds.”
What happened next? We Mean Businesses is still going. I think it’s sponsoring various news services to build a cuddly name for itself (quite a clever thing to do, btw).
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-three years ago, on this day, September 6th, 1991,
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 355ppm. As of 2024 it is 420ishppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that everyone in science of climate science and so forth, was aware of the whole greenhouse issue. And here was some nice science about the atmosphere of Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, and the greenhouse and reverse greenhouse or anti greenhouse effect on Titan.
It didn’t, to my knowledge, have any bearing whatsoever on the politics of the time. That’s not why I’m talking about it; this site is already far too much about the politics and could do with a bit more science. So here we are.
What happened next? People kept staring through telescopes figuring out the universe. Often quite expensive telescopes.
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.
The “What to do about C02?” documentary, directed by Russell Porter, is 40 years old. The tweet about it did well, and I contacted Russell to say that people were watching his (excellent) documentary.
“I used to say in my teaching that a good documentary film should work for any audience anywhere, beyond its own time and place.
“TV current affairs and news programmes on the same subjects are by definition ephemeral – they usually disappear after their initial broadcast.
“The challenge for documentarians is to find the universal truths behind the specific context, and I think the enduring appeal of these CSIRO films demonstrates this point.
“But as I said in the interview, I doubt this kind of film could be made today, certainly not within an institutional context.
“For a start the national institutions like CSIRO no longer have the luxury of their own production and distribution facilities.
“Secondly, the integrity of the institutions themselves has been fatally compromised by the imposition of Thatcherite privatisations and the need to “make profit” at the expense of all other values.
“The current revelations and legal / personal disasters relating to UK sub-post masters as a result of privatised corporate greed, lies and cover-ups is a case in point.
“It is revealing that there was no official reaction to these monumental injustices until the ITV broadcast of a compelling dramatised documentary. “Mr Bates Vs. The Post Office”.“
NB He wants to make clear that
it is just my personal view rather than anything formally connected to CSIRO. I haven’t had anything to do with the organisation since 1988
I say – one of the crucial losses in the last 40 years (not that before then was by any means perfect) has been the stupefaation and demoralisation of those opposed to escalating murder and mayhem against all other species, and future generations of humans. Our sense-making has been attacked, mostly successfully. And here we are.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Senator John Faulkner was a relatively new Federal Environment Minister, and was going to be making various launches of policy documents. John Coulter had been around talking and thinking about environmental issues since the early 70s. And as a Senator for the Democrats, was well entitled to offer some free advice.
What we learn is that there have been decent parliamentarians and I should say that I think both Coulter and Faulkner were decent parliamentarians trying to grapple with these issues.
What happened next? I don’t know if Faulkner took on board anything that Coulter said, there was then the battle over carbon tax. On Friday, February 10 1995 Faulkner ran up the white flag and instead we got the frankly ridiculous Greenhouse Challenge. And here we are. The emissions kept rising.
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.
