Thirty six years ago, on this day, September 7th, 1988,
On September 7, 1988, with the Summer of ’88 still fully in American consciousness, the ABC news programme Nightline broadcast a segment dedicated to the greenhouse effect. I was contacted as a possible guest but was later told my views were “too moderate.” Some of the exchange between “Nightline” moderator Ted Koppel and the environmental activist Michael Oppenheimer, of the Environmental Defense Fund, helps to make this dilemma quite explicit.
Koppell: Dr Oppenheimer, I’d love to be able to say to you that I think the American public can get energised over some perceived threat forty years down the road, but I don’t believe it. Do you?
[Hecht was on it to]
(Schneider, 1989: 235-6)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 351ppm. As of 2024 it is 420ishppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the American airwaves were full of greenhouse. Thanks to James Hansen’s June 23 testimony and the severe heatwave summer drought. And we’re getting to that stage in the media cycle where the responsible cautious scientists have had their say. And now in order to keep things “fresh” the bookers for these programmes are needing to jazz it up a bit with more extreme pronouncements. And previously, bookable scientists and advocates like Oppenheimer, for the Environmental Defence Fund are considered passe or too cautious. And then, of course, someone more extreme and perhaps unhinged gets booked. And then it becomes part of the culture war, with the opponents pointing to scare stories and the media can then report that and round and round and round we go.
What happened next? The climate culture war really kicked off in ‘89 with the George C Marshall Foundation, the Global Climate Coalition [it would be fun to figure out when that was born, when it started making its first pronouncements and interventions.] And this cycle continues down on to this day.
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
Ninety seven years ago, on this day, September 7th, 1927,
Wikipedia – On September 7, 1927, Farnsworth’s image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, to a receiver in another room of his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco.[23] Pem Farnsworth recalled in 1985 that her husband broke the stunned silence of his lab assistants by saying, “There you are – electronic television!”[23] The source of the image was a glass slide, backlit by an arc lamp. An extremely bright source was required because of the low light sensitivity of the design. By 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press.[25] His backers had demanded to know when they would see dollars from the invention;[27] so the first image shown was, appropriately, a dollar sign. In 1929, the design was further improved by elimination of a motor-generator; so the television system now had no mechanical parts. That year Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images using his television system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Pem.[citation needed]
Television, the drug of a nation
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 307ppm. As of 2024 it is 420ishppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that we had radio and if you could put pictures on that, well, whoop, you’d make some serious money. And of course, you could create the conditions for better education. Yeah, right.
What we learn is that television as a technology is coming up to its 100th birthday. I didn’t know that, I thought television was from the 30s.
What happened next BBC suspended its television broadcasting during the war, and it came back after the war. And then in the US, ownership of televisions went through the roof between 1950 and 1956. And in the UK, the thing that really got people going was the coronation.
And for the TV/environment nexus, well, yes there was some good stuff. And then there was eco-pornography (see below).
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.
Fifty four years ago, on this day, September 1st, 1970, the “left” conspiracy theory about the environment…
Hay reviews (2002: 259) that in the late 1960s, Marxists reacted to environmentalism with skepticism and hostility; defines it as ―a manifestation of the narcissistic and excessive individualism‖ of counter culture and false revolutionary movement. Sandor Fuchs on his paper, Ecology Movement Exposed, 1970 argues that the US ruling class develops environmentalism ―to divert attention from class-based issues
(Fuchs’ paper was in the September 1970 issue of “Progressive Labour”) f. Sandor Fuchs, “Population, Pollution, and Natural Resources: Ecology Movement Exposed,” PROGRESSIVE LAB (September, 1970): 5 If someone has a copy, please send…
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm. As of 2024 it is 420ishppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that in April of that year, Earth Day had happened. And lots of middl- class people who’ve come out and held hands and sang Kumbaya, and a certain number of student radicals have been part of that. And then of course, there had been the killing of four students at Kent State by National Guard troops, which I think happened in the beginning of May, in response to the bombing and invasion of Cambodia.
What we learn is that there were two perspectives on Earth Day that kind of get lost in this general nostalgia. One the radical right, saying that it was a communist trick to subvert the American way of life. And they pointed to the fact that this was apparently Vladimir Lenin’s birthday, the 22nd of April. And the other was this promulgated by the Maoists, and so forth, that it was all being done by the nefarious Rockefeller Fund and so forth to “split the anti-war movement” (as if it needed any help…)
Also we learn that any event will have multiple interpretations. So for example, the mere existence of Greta Thunberg is seen as a diversionary tactic somehow.
What happened next? I think the Maoists were mostly gone within a couple of years.
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
Nineteen years ago, on this day, August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hits Louisiana coast
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 380ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that warnings of increased intensity of hurricanes, if not their number, had been around for a while. The more local context was that the things that would protect New Orleans from a hurricane were levees and swamp lands and these were being neglected and drained because there was no money in it. And the US State was busy fighting an oil war in Iraq, and the local developers could always make more money. This was not a secret. The Times Picayune was covering it as per David Rovics’ song. There is a sort of whole false sense of inevitability. There’s also an awful sense of inevitability to the way the racism kicks in. If you’re black, you’re looting, if you’re white, you’re looking for food, and on and on and on.
What we learn And if you want to understand how the 21st century is going to play out, have a look at the monstrosity that was the state response, and the corporate response, and the societal response by and large, to Katrina. That monstrosity shows you what you need to know. So you won’t be surprised.
What happened next, New Orleans was “rebuilt” and gentrified and it’s slowly being eaten by sea level rise.
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.
References
See, also Naomi Klein See also Rebecca Solnit Paradise Built in Hell, et cetera.
See also Kim Stanley Robinson’s eerily prescient 40 days of rain imagery!
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says in an interview with the New York Times that his office’s investigation into Exxon is focused less on what the company knew about climate change years ago, and more on whether the company in recent years failed to report the potential impact of climate change regulations on its future business. In other words, the AG’s office is conducting “a straightforward fraud investigation.” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/science/exxon-mobil-fraud-inquiry-said-to-focus-more-on-future-than-past.html
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 404ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Americans love suing people. And there were various attempts to sue Exxon. These were initially based on how long they’ve known about climate change, but as the Attorney General makes clear, just getting them on today’s fraud is probably your best bet.
What we learn is that “this isn’t a Court of Justice son, this is a court of law”. The people who made the decisions to stop Exxon, working on low carbon, and the people who funded and led all the denial and delay and obfuscation do indeed deserve to be at The Hague and then sentenced to a low lying prison. But that’s not going to happen. Because the laws are not always written for the rich, they are always enforced for the rich.
What happened next, I think the court cases dragging on and on, of course.
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.
Forty years ago today (August 16, 1984) the New York Times, the “national” paper of the USA (1) ran a piece of particularly crafty propaganda. It was a paid full-page advert, on page 23, from the oil giant Mobil (2). The title of this masterpiece was “Why are they lying to our children?”, and the sordid episode has a lot to tell today and tomorrow’s climate campaigners – and for that matter anyone else interested in how fossil fuel interests have, with enormous success, sought to shape ‘common sense’ in democratic societies.
Short version: they don’t do it with chemtrails, or subliminal advertising. They do it with brute force and with subtlety, with repetition and repetition and repetition. And they’ve been doing it for a very long time (3).
Mobil had been running “editorial adverts” – a few hundred words of text about an issue du jour for over a decade at this point. These were the brainchild of a PR guru called Herb Schmerz, and you can learn more about them, and him, by going to this brilliant podcast by Drilled. There are some excellent spoofs of the ads by the German artist and provocateur Hans Haacke – for example MetroMobilitan.
The key point is that this is a really really clever form of propaganda, for several reasons. First because it doesn’t look like propaganda; it doesn’t deploy the crude and easily-spotted techniques of clapping seals, smiling dolphins and blue skies. Second, (and related) anyone who calls it propaganda can be accused of trying to refuse corporations a voice in public debate, since Mobil is at least trying to put a *rational* case, and isn’t that what liberals keep claiming they want, after all? Third (and related to the second) any attempt to respond to the half-truths and elisions in the adverts (the creators of these adverts are too canny to indulge in outright falsehoods) will take up at least as much time and energy, exhausting a third-party’s patience. This isn’t quite a Gish Gallop, but it is Gish Gallop-adjacent. Fourth, by setting out a ‘reasoned’ argument, Mobil is consciously setting the frame of the debate. And as various people have said, if they can get you asking the wrong questions then it doesn’t matter what the answers are. Finally, Mobil, through these ‘helpful’ adverts gets to claim a place as just another citizen in the ‘ideal speech community’, the term that the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas used to describe the situation where rich and poor, lion and lamb hash things out reasonably, arriving at agreed truths. Yeah, right.
So, this advert, forty years ago today, will have raised no eyebrows – it was just one of a very long line. Indeed, the only reason I am focussing on it at all is that I saw it in a collection released by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes and was struck by the line about “why are they lying to our children” and its mention of a book by that name. I wanted to know more, and didn’t have to go down too many electronic rabbit holes to find out more.
Before I get to the specifics, there’s one more piece of historical context that will help you understand what this is all about.
What is on the curriculum (overt and hidden) and how it is taught has always been a topic of contestation (and there’s nothing more political than who is allowed to learn to read – famously, slaves were forbidden from doing so in the American south).
However, matters had come to a head in the decade before this advert. You see, the aftermath of the 1960s and early 1970s was a period of serious concern to conservatives. That period had seen the black civil rights struggle give birth to the anti-war movement, to second-wave feminism, to gay rights, latino rights, indigenous movements, and to ecology movements. The “settled” consensus of the 1950s – that elite heterosexual white men, with science as their handmaiden, would rule, with women in the kitchen, people of colour (the words they used were different then!) in their place, queers in the closet and nature under the DDT etc. thumb – all that was gone by the early 1970s (4). If you want to stay in charge, well, you rely on unthinking consent: it’s a nightmare when the people you are trying to control get an education and are able to create their own perceptions of the world, share those, refuse to believe what you want and need them to believe (that this is the best of all possible worlds and that if they know their place everything will be okay, or at least tolerable).
The elites were alive to the threat, and were casting around for how to respond. There’s a key document that explains all this rather well. Almost exactly thirteen years before the Mobil advert, a memo (August 23, 1971) landed on the desk of Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., , the Chairman of the “Education Committee” of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The memo was written by Lewis Powell (Wikipedia), soon to be nominated as a Supreme Court justice by President Richard Nixon. It’s known as “the Powell Memorandum.”
Greenpeace USA describe it as “a corporate blueprint to dominate democracy”, and they’re not wrong. Here’s some of the sense of what the memo says
“Business must learn the lesson . . . that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”
“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”
The book itself
One source (I will come back to this, promise!) tells the origin myth of the book itself;
“New York University Dean, Dr Herbert London learned [about the lack of ‘balance’ in school education the hard way. One day his 13-year-old daughter came home from school with tears in her eyes to say, “I don’t have a future.” She showed her farther a paper shed been given in school. It listed horrors that it claimed awaited her generation, Including air pollution so bad that everyone would have to wear a gas mask.
“Well, as a result of that incident, London wrote a book…”
The book was published by the Hudson Institute, a cold-war think tank set up in the 1961 by Herman Kahn (one of a few possible inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr Strangelove’) and fellow nuclear war strategists. Its purpose was to argue for, in effect, ever-more nuclear weapons (it can be thought of as a precursor to the George C. Marshall Institute, set up at about the same time as this Mobil op-ed was published, to argue forReagan’s Space Defense Initiative aka “Star Wars” – for more on that, see Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book “Merchants of Doubt”).
Its author, Herbert London, was at the time an academic at New York University It was his first second solo book(5), and doubtless he was happy for the foreword from Herman Kahn (6). The book was published in 1984. You can borrow it here (please donate some money, on general principles, to the Internet Archives folks).
Before I hone in on what (little) it has to say specifically about climate change, we need to back up to the Powell Memorandum. There’s something in it that might put the sweet origin myth above, of a concerned dad simply trying to protect the mental health of his daughter – in a new light.
Evaluation of Textbooks
The staff of scholars (or preferably a panel of independent scholars) should evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology. This should be a continuing program. The objective of such evaluation should be oriented toward restoring the balance essential to genuine academic freedom.
(Powell, 1971, p.16-7)
And what did London magically set out to do – why, exactly this. What a coincidence…
It’s also worth pausing to think about the clever rhetorical work being done by the very clever title. “Why are they lying to our children?”
Let’s take the third word first – there is a nefarious and identifiable “They“. An alien force that needs to be combatted, defeated. This “they” are the communist eco-freaks, useful idiots of the Soviet Union seeking to undermine the Free West. You know, all those never-do-wells in the good old days of the 1920s through early 1960s, would have been dealt with via Red Scares and the House Un American Activities Committee and so on (all pre-dating Senator Joseph McCarthy, by the way).
They are trying to wickedly deceive sweet innocent children. Not “some” children (their own, for instance) but “our” – meaning the writers of this work are taking responsibility for ALL children, for everyone’s children (the “They” do not get to have any children of their own in this, something akin to JD Vance’s attack on childless cat ladies).
Finally (!!) the book itself. I’ve not read the whole thing (life is short, and it is way later than you think). Specifically on climate change, the book has little to say (6). Ironically, London first finds himself having to correct scientific errors in the textbooks he is reviewing.
“Moreover, their analysis of environmental issues includes several egregious errors. For example, carbon dioxide does not have a cooling effect on the climate, as was suggested in silver Burdett’s geography text cited above” (emphasis in original) (London, 1984, page 64)
A few pages later London quotes from the 1981 edition of a classic textbook (first published in 1968) called The Economic Problem by Heilbroner and Thurow, which mentions carbon dioxide build-up.
London is largely dismissive.
“The ‘greenhouse effect’ to which the authors refer is caused not so much from combustion in general as from the combustion of fossil fuels in particular. Which does increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. If the effect is ‘the most serious threat’ we face, a concerted effort to cope with this threat to our environment would mean solving the problems associated with the generation of nuclear power, which is clean, and the manufacture of synthetic fuels that are low in carbon content. But Heilbroner and Thurow don’t make this point, nor does any other textbook that includes the issue.” (London , 1984, p.93-4).
And .. that’s it.
If I can editorialise for a minute – for a book that sought to allay his thirteen year old daughter’s(7) fears, well – what a sloppy effort. He seems more interested in proving that he is smarter than some secondary school textbooks, and fulfilling the suggestion in the Powell Memorandum.
What happened next
Earlier I quoted a mystery guest on the subject of the origin myth of the book. And that mystery guest is… drumroll please… take a bow… give it up for… President Ronald Wilson Reagan! On February 28, 1985, shortly after his second inauguration (Morning in America) gave a speech at the Annual General Meeting of the National Association of Independent Schools.
The book was only mentioned in passing, though, as noted above, Reagan found time to include the heart-string-tugging origin myth. He said of the book that it “documents the myths that are taught in so many of our schools. Our children should know, London argues, that because our society decided to do something about pollution, our environment is getting better, not worse. Emissions of most conventional air pollutants, for example, have decreased significantly, while trout and other fish are returning to streams where they haven’t been seen for decades”
That’s a real sign of success, isn’t it? You know you’ve arrived when your book is getting a shout out from the President of the United States!
The book got a positive review (of course) in the neoconservative journal “Commentary” and popped up in the footnotes of various “anti-reflexive” (see McCright and Dunlap – and this video!) texts seeking to minimise environmental issues and prosecute the curriculum wars over the following decades.
The last major citation (to date) came ten years ago, when the UK “Global Warming Policy Foundation” regurgitated the origin myth in a report called “Climate Control”, which claimed there was “brainwashing” in the UK’s classrooms. No, I am not linking to it, and really, think twice before wasting your time with their trash: like I said it’s a lot later than you think. By the way, most UK climate denial is like this – a pale imitation and outdated photocopy of better-funded American efforts.
Battles over climate change and US secondary school textbooks have continued. They’ve involved famed scientists like James Hansen (see this blog post about April 9, 2008.)
More recently, the Heartland Institute, a climate denialist outfit, has been trying to muddy the waters by providing “alternative facts” in attractive format to secondary school teachers.
In the UK, Michael Gove, when Secretary of State for Education, tried to have climate removed from the curriculum in primary school. In this he was, ultimately, unsuccessful, thanks to … Ed Davey.
Oh, and London? Well, according to Wikipedia, font of all accurate information
The London Center for Policy Research (LCPR) is a 501(c)(3)nonprofit organization that was founded in 2012 by London in New York City and defines itself as a boutique think tank created to engage in research and advise on key policy issues of national security, international relations, energy, and risk analysis.[32] The center claims to challenge conventional wisdom where appropriate, add texture to the current deliberations on policy issues and build support for positions that further the national interest and the interest of key allies.[33] The London Center was influential in the staffing and policy direction of the Trump Administration with many of its senior fellows taking on both official and unofficial roles in the administration.[34] The center counts these “Fellows” among its membership: Deroy Murdock, Gordon G. Chang, Monica Crowley, Jim Woolsey, Derk Jan Eppink, and Walid Phares.
There is a forever war for the hearts and minds – especially of children. If you can shape their norms, their frames, then, well, that’s half the battle. But as TS Eliot wrote,”There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” The conservatives know this, and are in a state of endless anxiety about this (in their way, they are as addicted to apocalypse narratives as the Hallamites, only with much less scientific justification).
So, for progressives, leftists etc, a crucial lesson is that “they” -the “other side” – are diligent, relatively skilled, and extremely well-funded. Just because you disagree with them, you shouldn’t under-estimate them.
This tactic that London (among others) used will continue. The “won’t someone think of the children”gambit is too useful not to be used again and again, no matter how ludicrous. It frames the anti-reflexives/status quo supporters etc as the good guys, responsible adults merely trying to stop the long-hairs from terrorising sweet innocent children.
In addition, the pattern of the conveyor belt and mutual amplification of influence is still there; of op-ed turning into longer article, into book, that then gets quoted in advertorial or speeches by CEOs. Politicians then amplify it, it appears in Hansard, all the while gaining “credibility” through repetition, especially when “high status” people in think tanks (junk tanks), university departments etc. Thus are memes built. That’s what they want, anyway. It doesn’t always turn out like that, sometimes it doesn’t land/resonate, they get mugged by reality etc. Counter-memes can also be put forward by “the other side.”…
What to do
Educate yourself (this is most effectively and efficiently done with others by the way) by reading widely (see some starters below) and acting in the real world. If you’re after podcasts, you cannot do better than start with Drilled. Also, throw some money at them.
Get involved in a sustainable group that is a rough fit for your politics, and stay involved (this is, for various reasons, really really hard).
Don’t be surprised when everything goes sideways very quickly indeed. Instantaneously, on geological timescales.
Further suggested reading
Barley, S. R. (2010). Building an institutional field to corral a government: A case to set an agenda for organization studies. Organization studies, 31(6), 777-805.
Beder, S. 1997. Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism
(1) There’s a highly entertaining speech by Noam Chomsky, from 1985 that talks about the NYT in, ah, “somewhat unflattering” terms, to do with its “first draft of history function.” Watch this space – or perhaps marchudson.net – for more.
(4) In his 1994 book World Orders, Old and New, Noam Chomsky writes about the perceived “crisis of democracy” in the mid-1970s. This served as the title of the first book published by the Trilateral Commission. If you don’t have access to World Orders, Old and New, that’s alright, it’s a topic Chomsky has spoken of many times. There’s this interview in India in January 1996. And here’s something from the Boston Review in 2017 that gives the same flavour
What particularly troubled the Trilateral scholars was the “excess of democracy” during the time of troubles, the 1960s, when normally passive and apathetic parts of the population entered the political arena to advance their concerns: minorities, women, the young, the old, working people . . . in short, the population, sometimes called the “special interests.” They are to be distinguished from those whom Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind,” who are “the principal architects” of government policy and pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people.” The role of the masters in the political arena is not deplored, or discussed, in the Trilateral volume, presumably because the masters represent “the national interest,” like those who applauded themselves for leading the country to war “after the utmost deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community” had reached its “moral verdict.”
To overcome the excessive burden imposed on the state by the special interests, the Trilateralists called for more “moderation in democracy,” a return to passivity on the part of the less deserving, perhaps even a return to the happy days when “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” and democracy therefore flourished.
(5) In 1981 London had co-authored “Myths that Rule America.” A googlebooks search suggests it made no mention of carbon dioxide.
(6) Given the internal evidence, it was mostly completed before the September 1983 “battle of the reports”, where the Environmental Protection Agency released a report called “Can we delay a greenhouse warming?” (spoiler, the authors thought “probably not by very much”) and two days later the National Academies of Science released a report saying, in effect “nothing to see here.”
(7) The daughter in question is Stacy London, who most definitely does not share her father’s politics..
Forty six years ago, on this day, August 10th, 1978 a car blows up, and corporate malfeasance was revealed…
On their way to a church volleyball practice, the three girls—sisters Lyn (16) and Judy Ulrich (18), and their cousin Donna Ulrich (18)—chugged along U.S. 33 in a dusty 1973 Ford Pinto….
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 335ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Ford was one of the big three motor companies and had produced lemons in its time. People were dying because of a change that had been made to the Ford Pinto. This change meant that if it was hit from behind, while indicating left, then there was a reasonable chance that a spark would set off the gas tank explosion, and kaboom. Ford had been aware of the problem, but it calculated that recalling vehicles, fixing them and changing the production line would cost more than simply paying out to the families of those killed, injured. And therefore they did what any rational corporation would do.
What we learn is that there is rationality and logic and there is also utter fucking madness. I would say immorality, but why would you expect a corporation to behave morally? Have you not been paying attention?
What happened next, Ford got caught. There was a class action lawsuit even and for a little while, people understood that this sort of shit goes on all the time. But the corporate domination of the media means that this message no longer gets through so easily. In a sane world – one that we don’t live in – this would be taught in primary school, and again in secondary school.
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.
Forty five years ago, on this day, July 30th, 1979, politicians learn that making synfuels would be a Very Bad Idea.
Panel Warned of Synthetic Fuel Danger By Katherine Ellison, July 31, 1979
A group of scientists, warning of potential ecological imbalances and climatic changes, yesterday urged the government to slow its pursuit of a large-scale synthetic fuels program.
The scientists said the ecological changes could result from higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — one assured by product of a switch to synfuel production.
They described the so-called “greenhouse effect” whereby heat is trapped close to the earth by increased levels of carbon dioxide, and predicted some long-term effects might be erratic world food production, severe droughts in some regions and costal flooding in others.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 337ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that various US administrations had been quite interested in replacing Middle Eastern oil and making money at the same time. But of course, that came with fairly heavy environmental consequences, which climate scientists were at pains to point out.
What we learn is that national security and energy security can compete with other demands. Real energy trilemma at play. And that’s been going on a long time.
What happened next – the synfuels thing went away, in part because oil prices plummeted. The emissions kept going up though…
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.
Sixteen years ago, on this day, July 26th, 2008, music was the food of life…
New York’s biggest reggae festival will be held in central New York on Saturday July 26th, 2008 at the Rostropovich Amphitheatre in Gelston Castle Estate.
Reggae festival for climate protection is the biggest party for the environment. Come out and celebrate Mother Earth with great music, food, games and activities.
The festival, an all day event on July 26th, 2008 from 12 pm to 12 am is a fun-filled day of music, games, competitions, cultural activities and international cuisine. Awareness to the environment is the overall theme of the festival and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Alliance for Climate Protection to support their efforts.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 386ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had come out in 2006. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Everyone is running around talking about climate change. Given that reggae’s roots are in resistance to white people being assholes, it’s hardly surprising that there would be a climate themed reggae concert.
What we learn is that we have been trying to be artistic about resistance to the suicide path we are on, but it doesn’t seem to land because those events can cause a surge of emotion and commitment that will fall on stony ground and sterile soil. If there aren’t effective social movement organisations ready to capture it, the seeds can’t grow. And so it came to pass.
What happened next? More conferences, smoke and concerts. More cons. If you know your history, you will know where you’re coming from.
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.
Twenty seven years ago, on this day, July 23rd, 1997, Tim Wirth called out the Australians for being bonkers.
Asked about the economic modelling by the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE) on which the Howard Government’s stance is based, he said he had not seen it.
But he was generally sceptical of industry-funded models and said the US Administration believed modelling around the world showed green-house gases could be stabilised at either no economic cost or an economic benefit – a finding strongly at odds with ABARE’s work.
“I think there are some people who plug their own assumptions into models and then they flog those models as if they are the things that are going to define and predict the future of the world,” Mr Wirth said.
“Anybody who believes that an economic model is going to be able to predict to points of percentage of increase or decrease, I’d raise an eyebrow . . . or look at what those people have been smoking, because I don’t believe there’s any way in the world you are going to get that sort of accuracy.”
The ABARE modelling draws such conclusions and was partially funded by industry. “Industry groups . . . have points of view that they are paid to advocate,” he said.
Taylor, L. 1997. US rejects Aust `differentiated’ greenhouse goal. Australian Financial Review, 24 July, p3.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 364ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that at COP1 in Berlin in 1995, the rich nations had agreed that they would come to the third meeting with plans for their own emissions reductions. That meeting was to be held in Kyoto. International capital, especially oil and gas and coal, had mobilised ferociously against the science – see the attacks on the IPCC’s. second assessment report. And there were also campaigns in the US against Kyoto, Australia’s government, under that thug John Howard, trying to carve out the sweetest deal they could. And that’s what led Clinton’s climate envoy Senator Tim Wirth to say that he wanted to know what the Australians were smoking because he felt that the claims for special treatment were unjustified and demeaning.
What we learn – you can laugh at denialists and obstructors all you like. That doesn’t make them less formidable.
What happened next well, Australia wore down the other nations, it not only got the 108% so-called “reduction” target. But it also managed to insert a so-called “land clearing” clause, which meant in effect, their emissions reduction target was 130%. So, while Tim Wirth’s jibe was a good one, The Last Laugh belongs to Howard.
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.
