[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 314ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – everyone was blowing stuff up in the atmosphere. The comprehensive test ban was not a thing until a few years later.
Why this matters.
Not all the fears of imminent doom are born out (if they were, we wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on our feet! Humans do like to catastrophise…)
What happened next?
Somebody made a very cool movie – The Day the Earth Caught Fire – about (spoilers) H-bomb tests knocking the world off its axis. Do try to catch it – it’s a corker.
On this day, October 6 in 1988, the coal lobby said – of course it did – that the greenhouse effect had been “greatly exaggerated.”
Because before the promises for technological fixes, for complicated (and therefore easily gamed) financial instruments… comes flat out denial and minimisation.
The international coal industry hit back yesterday at charges that coal-fired power stations are a prime cause of the climatic changes associated with over-heating of the atmosphere.
The London-based World Coal Institute, representing a wide range of national and private coal utilities and traders, said research by its members showed that the contribution of coal-fired power stations to the phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect had been ‘greatly exaggerated.’
Samuelson, M. (1988) Coal Users Fend Off ‘Greenhouse’ Accusations. Financial Times, 7 October, p. 9.
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 349.37ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – Margaret Thatcher – British Prime Minister and not easily dismissed as an eco-loon – had given a surprise speech at the Royal Society a week or so earlier. The “greenhouse effect” was on the agenda, and coal was the bad boy (nuclear was trying to throw it under the bus).
Why this matters.
These industry bodies now promising a gleaming techno-future have a loooong history of, well, um, I believe the technical term for this is “lying.”
What happened next?
The World Coal group spent a long time “in denial” and then switched to promoting “carbon capture and storage.” In that time, emissions kept climbing. And climbing.
“The 16 member South Pacific Forum meeting was held at Rarotonga in the Cook Islands and attended by Prime Minister John Howard. Greenhouse and climate change issues received significant media attention during this meeting. Australia’s position on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions differed strongly from the other 15 nations attending the forum. The AOSIS (particularly Tuvalu) demands were for a binding 20 per cent reduction in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2005, while Australia aimed to avoid language calling for binding targets. At the conclusion of the meeting the Forum statement did not support the AOSIS proposal but urged parties to consider it.”
On this day the PPM was 364ish. Now it is 420ish – but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
Australia has been ignoring its neighbours on the existential threat of climate change for a very long time.
What happened next?
Australia carved out a sweet sweet deal at Kyoto. Then still would not ratify. Kept increasing its coal exports, kept hampering the development of renewables locally.
On Monday 30 August 1971 I watched biologist Professor Paul R. Ehrlich from Stanford University on the ABC’s Monday Conference. I was twenty-three. Ehrlich was interviewed by Robert Moore and questioned by a studio audience. It was my first encounter with environmentalism as opposed to a single environmental concern. Here was someone describing things I had long suspected were true but which had lain unformed in my consciousness…
(Carr, 2008:354)
Reading the thirty-three pages of transcript today, my attention spikes when an unnamed audience member asks:
“There was a paper in the New Scientist a few months ago by a physicist who estimated that we could only afford to increase the temperature of the earth’s surface by 3.5 degrees or we would probably flood most of the earth with the water which is now in ice, and we’ve already increased it by one degree, and if we keep producing energy and power from any source, no matter how much the resources we have, you can’t just do it, surely this is relevant?”
Ehrlich’s reply deserves to be weighed word by word, because here was the first emergence in mass media – and I did not see its significance – of the notion of global warming. Remember, this is 1971 and we were looking at this issue ‘through a glass darkly’. Let me quote Ehrlich’s reply – and emphasise the key phrases that pointed to catastrophe.
“The whole question of atmospheric dynamics and what’s happening to the climate is a very difficult one, and certainly it’s absolutely correct. If we continue on the long-range energy course we’re on, sooner or later we’ll melt the polar icecaps and we’ll all be swimming around at least in the coastal area. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple though because you see a great deal of material is being added to the atmosphere in the form of smog which tends to cool the planet, and unfortunately even beyond this we don’t understand enough about atmospheric dynamics though for instance the general warming trend in the planet may very well make Sydney colder, ad the disaster of all this is that when you change the climate you hurt agriculture. It doesn’t even matter [page break] if you change it for the better because agriculturalists like everybody else are conservative. You look around in New South Wales, you know, when you have one of these once in a million year droughts that you have every nine years […] So the whole question of atmospheric dynamics is under detailed study now by large groups of people – everybody’s scared – the recent study from MIT said we haven’t ruined the biosphere yet (it just came out about three weeks ago) but we’re right on the verge and we had better be very careful, but unfortunately we don’t have enough scientific evidence yet to know exactly what’s going to happen first.”
(Carr, 2008:354-5)
[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 325.43 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]
Why this matters.
We knew. We know we knew.
What happened next?
Australia kept digging up and exporting fossil fuels. Some people did very nicely indeed out of it, thank you. Future generations? Not so much.
On this day, August 14, 1971, police cars pulled up at various houses in middle-class Stanford and “arrested” a bunch of young men.
These fake arrests happened with the arrestees consent, because they’d agreed to take part in what was supposed to be a two week experiment. Half the participants were randomly selected to be prisoners, the others guards. The experimenters thought they’d have to study video tapes, tease out nuance…
Ha ha ha ha.
After 6 days the experiment had to be ended because the guards had – basically – gone completely fascist apeshit.
Turns out humans are a lot more susceptible to some gnarly ways of thinking and being than they want to believe.
That insight will be a great comfort as the Great Acceleration leads us all to accelerate off the Great Cliff onto the rocks of the Great Post-Anthropocene below.
On this day the PPM was 325.43 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
Obedience, conformity, hatred of “The Other” – all just below the surface, as Dr Bernie Rieux rieuxfully warned us….
What happened next?
No long-term studies on the effects on the young men, but it profoundly affected the grad student, Craig Haney, who went on to do enormous amounts of advocacy work around Death Row inmates, and criminology. I was lucky enough to do a class of his (Social Psychology) at University of California at Santa Cruz, 20 years after the Stanford study.
It’s 2am. The nightclub is still full, but about to empty.
You are lonely, horny and the options remaining are not as great as they were.
More than that, you’re drunk and your vision and judgement aren’t what they might be in the frigid light of day.
So that one over there in the corner, who’d normally be considered an arm-chewer/put-a-paper-bag-over-his-head-and-he-will-become-“mr-right-now”? They’ve just graduated to “warm body, will do for now.”
And if someone tries to mock you later, you can shrug your shoulders and say ‘whatever – I was wearing beer goggles.”
So, if I told you I was going to pivot this towards a thing about climate change, you’d brace yourself for some not very funny joke about ‘reducing emissions.’
Not today!
I want to try to be All Serious and Philosophical, and get into epistemology and ontology and other long-words I learnt at my first go on the rodeo of university, all those years ago.
Our judgement is affected by, well, goggles, lenses, expectations. The Germans have a word for it (of course) – Weltanschauung.
I would say that our last 100 years or so, and certainly since the Great Acceleration began in the 1950s, we (1) have been wearing oil goggles. We have been seeing the world as an inexhaustible orchard and playground, where there are no problems that cannot be solved. All you need is to go to a slightly deeper horizon and find more of The Stuff. And the stuff is all around us, we swim in oil the way that goldfish swim in water.
Scientists and activists have tried to puncture the lens, to rip the oil goggles (or blinkers, depending on your point of view), but we swat them away and duct tape the oil goggles on even more securely (2).
But we’re running out of duct tape, aren’t we?
And we can’t see this world, let along imagine others (there, told you I’d get the ontology stuff in there).
But the world can see us. And the age of consequences has begun.
The second half of (the first half of?) the twenty-first century is going to make the first half of the twentieth century look like a golden age of peace, love and understanding. Ho-hum.
Footloose notes.
(1) By “we” I mean people like me – middle-class, raised in the west in relative or absolute prosperity and security, in permanent global summertime, with the expectation that the future was also going to be secure, with ever-cooler and shinier gadgets. That has never been a “we” that covered most people, even in the West. It covers fewer and fewer people as time goes on. But people do cling to their oil goggles.
(2) Vision-smission. The typical western privileging of sight, blah blah. See also John Carpenter’s delirious ‘They Live!’, for a slightly different sunglasses thing.
On this day in 1988 we were warned. Again.. With the Toronto conference on The Changing Atmosphere approaching, the WMO released a report, and scientists tried to alert the media.
This from the Associated Press-
“Things are going to change too fast,” scientist Michael Oppenheimer said as the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations Agency, released a report last week on the climate change that could be triggered by the “greenhouseeffect.”
The report painted a picture of a global civilization heating its atmosphere in a myriad of ways, from burning fossil fuel to destroying tropical forests.
Those actions could force the average temperature up by 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the next three decades, the report says. That might not sound like much, but the scientistssay it would be enough to wreak havoc.
Such a temperature increase, for example, would cause the sea level to rise by 10 inches, bringing seawater an average of 83 feet inland, according to Oppenheimer.
“The potential for economic, political and social destruction is extraordinary,” said biologist George Woodwell.
‘Greenhouse Effect’ Could Trigger Flooding, Crop Losses, Scientists Say The Associated Press June 13, 1988
Why this matters.
We knew. Never forget that we knew.
What happened next?
We did nowt, unless you count toothless treaties and wishful thinking as action. Personally, I don’t.
On this day, June 9, 1989, Australian Labor Party heavyweight and Environment Minister Graham Richardson faced off with (then-powerful) trade union figures.
The ALP were facing a very tight election soon. Bob Hawke was ageing, Paul Keating was wanting the top job. The economy was not good (interest rates very high) and the Liberals looked credible and were making green noises. The Tasmanian election of May 1989 had seen a huge green vote.
So, it was crucial to get this right. But what about the workers??
AN ODDLY portentous scene was played out behind the closed doors of the ALP national executive’s last meeting in Canberra on June 9 by two of the party’s toughest right-wing figures: the Federal Environment Minister, Graham Richardson, and the AWU general secretary, Errol Hodder.
Hodder, who had left the executive meeting briefly, returned to be told that while he was away Richardson had spoken of how the union movement had to reassess its position on the environment, and that someone present had said that the ACTU’s attitude on the issue was “stupid”.
Never backward in coming forward, Hodder leapt up to make a strong defence of the union movement’s reaction to the growing importance of the environmental debate.
What he said, in essence, was that the unions were well aware of the significance of the issue but the Government had to recognise a few things too. A tree might be a pretty thing to look at, but the view paled when you’d been put out of a job and you’d a mortgage to pay and a family to feed.
Clark, P. 1989. Unions may as well be talking to the trees. Sydney Morning Herald, 20 June, p13
This is a cheat – this is a 1992 document. There IS a 1989 policy, I just can’t find it right now…
Why this matters.
Have we squared this circle yet? Really? Maybe the red-green alliance we need is at hand. I will believe it when I see it. Here’s a picture of “Richo” back in the day.
What happened next?
In order to win the next election the ALP promised an “Ecologically Sustainable Development” process. And then filed the results in the circular file, obvs (more on that in August…)
Within a few months, the ACTU had changed its tune –
The ACTU has signalled it is changing its colours and turning green by making its first major policy statement on environmental issues.
The statement – to be debated at the ACTU Congress this morning -represents a concerted attempt by the organisation to overcome public opinion that the union movement is full of pro-logging rednecks.
The ACTU hopes that by tapping into the groundswell of concern over environmental matters it will prove its relevance to the community and boost its membership numbers. ACTU delegates privately conceded yesterday that the union movement had allowed itself to become an irrelevant voice in public debate on environmental issues.
Personal disclaimer/pre-emptive statement
The “right” has been extremely successful at driving wedges between environmentalists and trades unionists, with caricatures of each. Without organisation by working class people, it is not going to be possible to do anything meaningful about climate change. It just isn’t. Unfortunately, given how hard the struggle for them to even get to organise (laws designed to make it impossible to unionise), “abstract” issues like, oh, the fate of the planet, often don’t resonate. I have, in my looong life, seen moments for red-green co-operation squandered, gulfs of mutual-incomprehension and antipathy grow. We need to do better…
On this day, June 1st 1965, Tom Lehrer sang his song “Pollution” at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco, as part of his “That was the week that was” gig.
Lehrer had basically “retired” from his tours, when asked to write topical songs for a weekly satirical TV show called “That was the week that was” (the songs were brought together in an album called “That Was The Year That Was”).
The song, picking up on growing concerns about air, water, noise and – well – everything – pollution, contains priceless lyrics such as
If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!
YEAR: 1965 Lehrer singing “Pollution” at the hungry i
On May 19, 1997, 25 years ago, and months before the Kyoto meeting at which the world’s richest countries are supposed to agree binding emissions cuts, the Chief Executive Office of one of the world’s biggest oil companies, John Browne of BP, makes a speech at Stanford University.
This marks the end of the united anti-climate front of the oil majors, exemplified by the “Global Climate Coalition.”
Browne said, in part
“There is now an effective consensus among the world’s leading scientists and serious and well informed people outside the scientific community that there is a discernible human influence on the climate and a link between the concentration of carbon dioxide and the increase in temperature … it would be unwise and potentially dangerous to ignore the mounting concern.” He added: “If we are to take responsibility for the future of our planet, then it falls to us to begin to take precautionary action now.”
Fracture points and critical junctures that turn out to… well, not matter as much as they seemed to. What can ya do?
See also
“The overlapping and nesting of organizational fields implies that developments in one country or industry can disrupt the balance of forces elsewhere. For example, the landmark speech by British Petroleum’s Group Chief Executive, John Browne on 19 May 1997 represented a major fissure in the oil industry’s position, which bore implications for other industries in Europe and in the USA”. (Levy and Egan, 2003: 820)
