On this day, July 30 1989 Conservative Politician Sir Ian Lloyd was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying ‘we have, at the most, a quarter of a century to make the assessments and take action. The life of the planet may be at stake.’
Wikipedia has him saying “civilisation is clinging by our fingernails to the cliff”.
for which academic (and other) researches owe him a debt of gratitude.
Lloyd was a prescient guy who, well, later started wittering on about pyramids of uncertainty, and Bjorn Lomborg. It happens. It’s sad when it does, but it happens. See obituary here.
Why this matters.
Did the rhetoric help us resist our own death grip? No, it didn’t. It never does.
On this day, July 28 1990, journalist John Gribbin (author of several books about climate change published in the 1970s and 1980s) had a nice snippet to help us build the picture of the international efforts to scupper climate action, back in the crucial 1988 to 1992 period.;
“last month, when members of the George C. Marshall Institute, a privately funded think tank based in Washington DC, were flown in to present their maverick views on climate change, it came as no surprise to find that the room at the Hyde Park Hotel in which they gave their talks… had actually been booked by British Coal’ (John Gribbin, Why caution is wrong on global warming’.
New Scientist, 127, 28 July 1990, p. 18)
The “George C. Marshall Institute” had been set up in 1984 to slow down environmental regulation (slippery slope to Pol Pot and Stalin, don’t you know) for a while. They became an early and important node of organised climate resistance. They were – and this is gonna shock you – funded by fossil fuel companies.
The transatlantic links have not weakened. They have, in fact, strengthened.
What happened next?
The UK accelerated the decline off its coal industry, and imported lots of natural gas. This made it seem like they were making progress on emissions reductions. So that’s nice.
We need to remember that organizations come and go, and are creatures of their time, and can be “trapped” – by their own cognitive and emotional settings, by others expectations and perceptions of them. A little like humans themselves, donchathink?
What happened next?
The Conservation Society was influential and important in the late 60s – we will come back to the 1968 lecture by Ritchie Calder. Its apogee was 1971-2, when it hosted a conference with Paul Ehrlich as a guest speaker. Its decline in influence through the 1970s and 80s (it was wound up in 1987) was tied to the rise of groups like Friends of the Earth and The Ecology Party (aka The Green Party), not tied to population concerns and not perceived as old, white and conservative.
On this day, 15 July, in 2005 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown announced that he had asked Sir Nicholas Stern to lead a major review of the economics of climate change, to understand more comprehensively the nature of the economic challenges and how they can be met, in the UK and globally.
Stern produced the report- released in late 2006, and this was for a while used as a “don’t worry, there’s now a report that shows business it should act, so, you know, business will defo act” kind of thing. And some nice diagrams.
Stern paid a flying visit to Australia, and the embattled Prime Minister John Howard dismissed him for being (checks notes) English. Yeah, it all got that crazy.
Why this matters.
These reports come and go. We should remember that when the next one comes along, as it soon will.
But the pictures were nice. This one got “traction.”
What happened next?
Yeah. You know what happened next. The UK Climate Change Act (2008). The stunning success that was the 2009 Copenhagen COP. The rapid decarbonisation of essential industry. The transformation of economies and societies to adapt to inevitable change, and mitigation to minimise the damage, reparations for those affected. The land of milk and honey, the sunny uplands. Er, yeah, nah.
On this day, July 8, 1991 the United Kingdom Prime Minister John Major gave his first, brief speech about environment/global warming, at a Sunday Times.Environmental Conference.
He came about as close as any UK Prime Minister/Satrap of the 51st State can to saying “Hey, America, get your act together.”
All he could really bring himself to say was “The United States accounts for 23 percent, the world looks to them for decisive leadership on this issue as on others.”
“Personally, I have always thought it wrong to call it the greenhouse effect, I dislike the term, I dislike it because the image is too cosy, too domestic and far too complacent. Begonias and petunias it most certainly is not, the threat of global warming is real, the spread of deserts, changed weather patterns with potentially more storms and hurricanes, perhaps more flooding of low lying areas and possibly even the disappearance of some island states.”
The context was that the UK was about to host the G7 meeting, and the USA was digging its heels in during the negotiations for a climate treaty, slowing things down so that only the most minimal deal could be reached.
A recent trip to the US by UK Environment Minister Michael Heseltine had failed to break logjams, and Heseltine had publicly slapped down a senior US official who was trash-talking him.
Why this matters.
We always need to remember that the architecture of international law – the UNFCCC – was shaped by United States hostility to global action.
What happened next?
Major, at Rio the following year, offered to host the follow-up event, to show the UK “mattered”. And the winner was… Manchester. Ooops.
On this day, 6 July, 1972, the Trades Union Council [the peak body for UK unions) held a conference on “Workers and the Environment”
Why this matters.
Without unions on board, you’re probably not going to be able to force state managers into major concessions that last any length of time. But unions and greenies, while they have some common interests (habitable planet, etc) ALSO have sticking points. These needed proper thrashing out, loose coalitions forming blah blah. Conferences like this coulda been a start.
Too late now.
What happened next?
The Unions had other stuff on their plate all through the 70s. And the 80s.And it’s not as if the stereotype of condescending middle-class busybodies who sneer at workers is ENTIRELY made up, now is it? And the carbon dioxide, it accumulates.
“More than 100 British scientists, including two Nobel laureates, have lent their names to an advertising campaign starting this week which says that focusing on nuclear power will worsen global warming by diverting attention from the real causes of the problem.
“The academics, also including 15 Fellows of the Royal Society, reject claims that more nuclear power stations are the answer to the greenhouse effect, and say the Government should concentrate on “real solutions” to global warming….
“The two Nobel laureates taking part in the campaign are Professor Dorothy Hodgkin, emeritus Professor of chemistry at Oxford University, and Professor Maurice Wilkins, emeritus professor of biophysics at London University.”
Nuclear – a technology always in search of legitimacy, given its other problems (waste, security, meltdowns etc).. Its advocates had in fact been talking about coal’s nasty little CO2 problem for a long time.
What happened next?
Nuclear kept promising. Still is – see April 2022 Energy Security Strategy.
On this day, 2nd July 2013, Boris Johnson wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph (he was getting £250k a year for this gig). Its title was “Wind farms couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.” Johnson warned the UK is facing a major energy crisis. That at least he got right.
Offshore wind is of course a huge success story, and on-shore wind would probably have been too, but for the Cameron government making it virtually impossible to get planning permission.
Why this matters.
This sort of ignorant glib opposition is, well, it’s one of the many reasons the species isn’t going to make it.
On this day, June 28 1982 (40 years ago today) Nigel Lawson, as Secretary of State for Energy in the first government of Margaret Thatcher, gave a “landmark speech” on energy policy to the International Association of Energy Economists. I can’t find a copy of it online. Ho hum.
In his seminal speech in 1982, he defined the Government’s role as setting a framework that would ensure the market, rather than the state, provided secure, cost-efficient energy.
This was driven by a desire to create a system where competition worked for families and businesses.
“The changes in prospect,” said Lawson at the time, “will help us ensure that the supplies of fuel we need are available at the lowest practicable cost.”
So, what did these fine words mean? Publicly-owned assets were flogged off and some people got even richer.
Planning became impossible. It was all “fine” (not really, but looked it to some) until we needed to think long-term and strategically about what kind of fuel sources we used to get how much energy and for what purposes. Because privately owned companies are going to want to sell more of their product, not less. This is not rocket-science.
Why this matters.
Well, that period – late 70s, early 80s, , was probably our last best chance to do anything meaningful about climate change. Oh well.
What happened next?
With energy policy? Ha ha ha ha ha.
We now (April 2022) have an “Energy Security Strategy” that doesn’t mention demand reduction, energy efficiency, on-shore wind. Instead it goes Full Fantasy on nuclear, CCS and hydrogen.
Epic thread by Michael Jacobs, that ends thus –
It is almost a textbook case of short-term intra-party political interests, lobbying and ideology outweighing the stated policy objectives of the government. Not hard to explain for a political scientist but depressing nevertheless. Good for my next textbook though. /end
On this day, June 24th, in 2009, the Scottish parliament unanimously passed the Climate Change (Scotland) Act. This enabled the devolved Scottish government, led by the Scottish National Party’s minority administration, to look slightly more progressive than the UK New Labour government at Westminster. This government, then led by Gordon Brown, had passed the Climate Change Act for the whole of the UK in 2008.
Some provisions in the Scottish Act went further than the UK legislation; for example a slightly higher emission reduction target for 2020. This was the result of a parliamentary bidding war (a 42% target reduction in Scotland, compared to 34% for the UK as a whole). Also, there were to be annual targets to sit within 5 year carbon budget periods (the UK Act didn’t have those annual targets).
Sarah Louise Nash has written extensively in the academic journal Environmental Politics about the alliances that were formed in Scotland to shape the Act during a period of increased activist and media attention to climate change (paywall). A key factor was the desire for Scotland to be able to position itself as a global leader at the COP19 summit held in Copenhagen later in 2009, which ended famously in acrimonious failure.
In 2019, during the latest wave of enhanced activist and media concern about the worsening climate crisis, the Climate Change (Scotland) Act was amended to set more stringent emission reduction targets. The UK Government had just altered its legislation to set a net zero target for 2050 (up from an 80% reduction target). Scotland again followed suit and positioned itself as slightly more ambitious by proposing net zero by 2045, with interim targets for 2030 and 2040. The Scottish Green Party abstained on the Bill that introduced the new targets, arguing that an 80% reduction target by 2030 is needed, instead of the Bill’s 75% target (increased from the SNP’s proposed 70%).
Just like in 2009, 2019’s legislative change came before an important global summit that failed to meet inflated expectations. COP26, scheduled to be held in Glasgow in 2020, and delayed due to Covid until 2021, involved Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon trying, with limited success, to get on stage to position Scotland as a world leader, as cringy selfies showcased by the Murdoch Press (Sunday Times) help make apparent.
Nicola Sturgeon poses in red with various leaders at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021.
The lesson to take from this history is that, despite bidding wars for the status of virtue and global leadership on climate change that help to increase legislative ambition, the numbers still fail to add up when the baseline for ‘leadership’ is so disastrously low.
Dr Robbie Watt is an academic at University of Manchester, a core group member of Climate Emergency Manchester and an all-round lovely bloke. He has another guest post on All Our Yesterdays, here.
