Category: United Kingdom

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Cultural responses International processes United Kingdom

June 16, 1972 – David Bowie and (Five Years until) the End of the World. Also, Stockholm

On this day, June 16, in 1972 the  UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, concluded. Four years in the making it had acted as a magnet for lots of various concerns.  It also acted as a punctuation point – the end of the first big wave of public concern about environmental matters (the next wave wouldn’t really get going until the mid-late 80s).

What did Stockholm give us? Well, the United Nations Environment Program, albeit at a much lower size and heft than some wanted.  UNEP proved crucial as an institutional ally for the World Meteorological Organisation and various groups of scientists trying to get carbon dioxide build up properly on and then up the agenda.

But on the same day, and more interesting,, was the release of the song “Five Years” by David Bowie (it had been recorded in November 1971).

Pushing thru the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over,
We had five years left to cry in

News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying

Why this matters. 

Stockholm, Bowie – yeah. Well, here we are. Fears of imminent (ecological) catastrophe have been with us before (that does not automatically mean that the latest rash of fears is unwarranted).

What happened next?

Stockholm became the major example of “how you do international environment conferences” I think, and the template has been replayed and replayed. 

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Activism United Kingdom

June 13, 2008 – activists stop coal train, throw coal off. Convictions eventually quashed…

On June 13 June 2008 climate activists involved in the whole “camp for climate action” thing stopped a train heading to Drax power station in Yorkshire (the site of the first Camp for Climate Action, in August-September 2006).

They shovelled coal off it before the police arrived and arrested them all.

See Indymedia for more pictures.

They went on trial A year  later 

“Twenty nine people were convicted in July following a four-day jury trial at Leeds crown court. Today, at the same court, Judge James Spencer QC, ordered five, who had previous convictions, to do 60 hours unpaid work and three were ordered to pay £1,000 in costs and £500 compensation to Network Rail. The judge said the loss to the company had been almost £37,000. Twenty one members of the group were given conditional discharges for 12 months.”

And in January 2014… those convictions were quashed because the driver for the activists had been… undercover cop Mark Kennedy.

A re-do action by Greenpeace in September 2014 got no coverage, as best I can tell…

Why this matters. 

We should know about the brave history of direct action on climate change. It didn’t start with Extinction Rebellion.

What happened next?

Drax is now telling the world it will be storing its emissions under the North Sea

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United Kingdom

May 16, 2006 – UK Prime Minister Tony Blair goes nuclear…

On 16 May 2006 UK Prime Minister Tony Blair speech gave a speech at a Confederation of British Industry event, basically saying that regardless of the outcome of the then-current “consultation” about nuclear energy, his government would forge ahead anyway.

The 2003 Energy White Paper had been very lukewarm on nuclear indeed, and this speech by Blair was the culmination of a determined lobbying fightback…

Why this matters

We need to remember that most “consultations” are window-dressing. They’ll be heavily publicised if they go the “right” way, and used as a stick to beat those opposed as “anti-democratic”. If the results aren’t what those in power wanted, they’ll be buried (released at 5pm on a Friday afternoon etc) and dismissed as “having been hi-jacked by well-organised special interests.”

What happened next

Greenpeace took the government to court over the shonkiness of the consultation, and in February 2007 they won, for what it is worth.

Despite all the plans and announcements, the nuclear power stations were not built – one in the last 12 years, massively over-budget.

Meanwhile, energy efficiency and onshore wind are ignored as ever., and the overarching question of energy demand reduction is deep in the hole.

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United Kingdom

May 8, 1972 – “Teach-in for Survival” in London

Guest post by Roger of superb Green History website.

On this day, May 8, 50 years ago, students at Queen Elizabeth College, London University held a one day “Teach-in for Survival” inspired by the Ecologist publication of the “Blueprint for Survival” special issue in January 1972. They managed to get some quite high profile people to give talks and with minimal publicity the numbers booking to attend snowballed and the venue had to be switched to the Great Hall at Imperial College – over 500 people came on the day. Read the full story below.

Why This Matters

The Ecologist Blueprint had caused quite a stir in the chattering classes and even in the popular press. The students wanted to explore whether technology could reverse the negative trends (pollution, population, resource depletion, and ecological stress leading to human societal collapse) that Blueprint identified, and also to look for opportunities for practical action. In the event it became clear that only bottom up system change driven by grass roots action to transform the social political and economic system could avert the coming disaster.

What Happened Next

After an inspiring day the students returned to take their exams and get on with life. A few spent the next 50 years going on protest marches about this and that, or telling people how the ecological problems were getting much worse, or trying to get elected to get environmental action up the political agenda – completely forgetting the main lesson from the Teach-in and from Blueprint: that the changes needed require a completely different social system, not engagement with the old system.

And here we are, still making the same mistakes and time has so nearly run out.

You can read the full article on which this blog post is based here.

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Carbon Capture and Storage Technophilia United Kingdom

May 2, 2012 – CCS is gonna save us all. Oh yes.

On this day (May 2nd) in 2012 the UK government announced a “Carbon Capture andStorage” Cost Reduction Taskforce which would

“to advise the government and industry on the steps needed to reduce the cost of CCS, so that it could compete with other low carbon technologies in the 2020s.” (see also this press release).

CCS has long been the get-out-of-jail-free card for industry (esp oil and gas) and a lot of time and money has been spent on it. But it still ain’t here. Maybe this time will be different…

Why this matters

We need to remember that these salvationary technologies have fallen over repeatedly, and ask ourselves “gee, maybe we could focus on, you know, just using hella lot less energy?”

What happened next

CCS fell over, got picked up and dusted off, and is again flavour of the month.

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United Kingdom

April 22, 1975 – UK Civil Service scratches its head on #climate

Blah blah Earth Day 1970.

On this day 22nd of April 1975, a meeting of the World Trends Committee of the Cabinet Office had an (inconclusive) discussion about climate change. A very small number of people within the UK state (as distinct from the government) was beginning to pay attention to the build-up of carbon dioxide doing nothing particularly was happening in public.

“Warren, who was one of its two secretaries, suggested putting a position paper on climatological research to the World Trends committee.36 The Met Office provided a paper that covered climate change for discussion in 1975.37 The ‘conclusion of the paper was that it was all very difficult and that ‘‘fundamental understanding has not reached a stage which permits a reliable computation of future climate. Moreover, natural climate time-series can give no useful indication of future trends’’’.

38 NA CAB 134/3974.  Sawyer, ‘Problems of assessing the future climate’, WT(75)7, 4 April 1975. 

The paper was discussed at WT(75)2nd meeting, 22 April 1975.”

Source – see brilliant paper by Jon Agar here).


Why this matters. 

We have to remember that there was a significant but largely ignored history before Thatcher gave her speech at the Royal Society in September of 1988. And this has been excavated by Gabriel Henderson and Jon Agar, among others.

What happened next?

The Civil Service bureaucracy did produce a report,  that was finally released in 1980. And when the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK, John Ashworth, tried to brief Margaret Thatcher in 1980 she said apparently “incredulously” “you want me to worry about the weather?”

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Greenwash United Kingdom

April 20, 2006 – David Cameron does “hug-a-husky” to detoxify the Conservative “brand”

On this day, April 20 2006, David Cameron, newly-minted opposition leader in the UK, the head of the Conservative and Unionist Party, had his photo op with a husky in the Arctic. The context was that Cameron needed to detoxify the Conservative brand. And he’s chosen environmentalism as the way to do that, in much the same way that Kevin Rudd would use climate and environment as a wedge issue against John Howard a year or so later in Australia.

Why this matters. 

We really, really really need to learn not to take anything a politician, any politician says at face value. And we need to help other people understand that – or rather, we need to get beyond information deficit and deference, to a sense of the power that (potentially) rests in social movements. Or did. Probably too late to do anything now.

What happened next?

Gordon Brown became Labour Prime Minister, and bottled calling an election in 2007. The global financial crisis hit and then there was an air of inevitability around Cameron becoming Prime Minister which he did, thanks to the Liberal Democrats in May of 2010. In 2012

In January 2012 the Guardian reported that

“The head of the charity that helped to arrange David Cameron’s memorable husky photoshoot in the Arctic, launching the Conservatives’ rebranding as the nice-not-nasty party, has warned that the PM’s lack of leadership on environment issues risks “retoxifying” their image.”

In 2013, Cameron infamously commanded “get rid of all the green crap”. Which is costing ordinary people money now.

History does not record what happened to the husky.

Categories
Ignored Warnings United Kingdom

April 16, 1980 – “a risk averse society might prefer nuclear power generation to fossil fuel burning”

On April 16 1980, John Ashworth, then the Chief Scientific Adviser of the UK,, wrote to another senior figure, Robert Armstrong (Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary) on the question of preparing people to accept nuclear in order to drive down fossil fuel emissions. A few days later, Robert Armstrong wrote back saying this needed some further thinking. 

Where do I get this info? From a wonderful article by Jon Agar, from 2015 ‘Future Forecast—Changeable and Probably Getting Worse’: The UK Government’s Early Response to Anthropogenic Climate Change

As John Ashworth wrote, his personal view was” that the nuclear waste problem is manageable whilst the CO2 problem is not and therefore that a risk averse society might prefer nuclear power generation to fossil fuel burning if it were offered the choice. A rational risk averse society, of course, might prefer energy conservation to either….”

86  86 TNA CAB 184/567. Ashworth to Robert Armstrong, 16 April 1980. Armstrong replied that the idea of inducing the public to go along with nuclear energy by frightening it with global warming ‘would need much thought’. Armstrong to Ashworth, 21 April 1980 

Why this matters

We need to know that the UK Government was, well, portions of the bureaucracy of the UK Government, were well aware of the issue. It became impossible, however, for this policy discussion to proceed, because Thatcher wasn’t interested (when Ashworth briefed Thatcher on the issue in 1980, she replied incredulously “you want me to worry about the weather?”

What happened next?

Well, the nuclear lobby in 1988/89, would try to use climate change as a spur to more nukes. And failed. And tried again from 2006. And failed. And, as we have seen in the recent “Energy Security Strategy”, it continues to do so down unto this day.

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Science Uncategorized United Kingdom

April 4, 1978 – UK Chief Scientific Advisor worries about atmospheric C02 build-up

Okay, fourth of April 1978, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government Sir John Ashworth writes a letter in which he says – well, here is Janet Martin-Nielsen (2018) Computing the Climate: When Models Became Political  Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2018) 48 (2): 223–245.

“The Meteorological Office’s ‘‘important and very helpful’’ work on Concorde, Ashworth wrote in a secret letter to Berrill, proved the value of climate modeling to U.K. interests—and since ‘‘the real worry is now the CO2 level in the atmosphere’’ he continued, the Meteorological Office needed to focus its energy in that direction   . J. M. Ashworth to K. Berrill, re: ‘‘Meteorological Research,’’ 4 Apr 1978, secret KEW, CAB 184/567W01211, 

The context for this is that the UK Government had started looking via its World Trends Study Group at the climate issue, also paying attention to what was happening in the United States. Also you have to factor in the the aftermath of the very hot summer of 1976, and the very cold winter in the US and Canada of 1977. 

And it’s clear that they were trying to get their head around the problem. But not everyone in the UK scientific establishment was at all sold on this. And it would require other entrepreneurs as well, like Solly Zuckerman and Herman Bondi to push further. Unfortunately, all of this culminated in 1980 with Ashworth trying to brief the new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and her response was an incredulous “you want me to worry about the weather?”

And it would be another eight years before that she would do one of her turns because it turns out the lady was frequently for turning 

Why this matters. 

We need to puncture the myth that Thatcher deserves any credit whatsoever. She was warned a decade earlier,did nowt.

What happened next?

The problem stream entrepreneurs tried to get the issue paid attention to, but everything was against them.  And it had to wait until 1988 for attention to be paid….

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Coal Fossil fuels Industry Associations United Kingdom

April 3, 1991- Does coal have a future?

On this day, third of April 1991, the World Coal Institute was holding a conference in London

Rubin, E. 1991. Environmental constraints: Threat to Coal’s Future? Keynote Session Presentation to the World Coal Institute Conference on Coal In the Environment London, England April 3, 1991

The question of coal’s longevity was because of environmental constraints was a hot topic, because negotiations were underway (or rather, Uncle Sam was busy slowing down attempted negotiations) for a global climate treaty.

The World Coal Institute had formed in the late 70s as a global body for the coal production industry. It has emerged out of a smaller group as these things are wont to do. And of course, by 1991, everyone  and their dog was still kind of talking about climate change if they weren’t talking about the war in Iraq. 

And what we learned is that there have been various technological options (not solutions – and eye-wateringly expensive) sitting alongside a certain amount of, so-called scepticism, leaning over into outright denial. 

Why this matters. 

We need to know that the industry lobbies are always active, always watching who is trying to figure out how to turn an issue  back into a problem and a problem into a non problem. And often they succeed at least in the short-term. That’s predatory delay for you.

What happened next?

The World Coal Institute would become the World Coal Association. And it would fight the “good” fight on resistance to regulations, and spouting hopey-changey nonsense about new technologies (CCS, HELE – the acronyms change, but the siren song of delay and putative technosalvation remains the same).. That is what these types of outfits do, and they generally do it quite well, if you’re a politician looking for cover to not do the right thing by future generations…