Categories
Australia Carbon Pricing Economics of mitigation Politics

Jan 21 (2010) – The flub that sank a thousand policies #auspol

On this day, in 2010, – yes, another Australia one, but it “matters” –  Australian  Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, was caught out having to admit that his proposed “carbon pollution reduction scheme” was dead and that he was kicking the whole climate issue into the long legislative grass.

The CPRS was an insanely complex piece of legislation. Economist Ross Garnaut said of it in December 2008 that  “”Never in the history of Australian public finance has so much been given without public policy purpose, by so many, to so few,”“ – and that’s before the further watering down. Green groups had called it a give-away to the fossil fuel lobby, and the Green Party had refused to support it in parliament in late November 2009, meaning that it failed to become law.

Rudd was in Norwood, a leafy, and relatively affluent suburb of a large country town called Adelaide in South Australia.

As leader of the Australian Labor Party, Rudd had used climate change as a battering ram to differentiate himself from Prime Minister John Howard, and been elected to do something about the issue. As Prime Minister from late 2007, he had been playing chicken with the Liberal National Party, especially its leader Malcolm Turnbull, and had initially rejoiced when Turnbull was replaced by the dark horse (and subsequent wrecking ball) Tony Abbott. 

But the climate conference in December 2009 in Copenhagen didn’t go well. And in the aftermath, Rudd ignored the urging of senior Labour Party members to call a snap election on the question of climate policy, and then didn’t even come up with a plan B. So he was caught on the hop. We know all of this because the period is intensely reported in the battle of the memoirs. And I’d alert you to Philip Chubb’s Power Failure. Julia Gillard’s My Story, Paul Kelly’s Triumph and Demise. 


What happened next?  Australia entered a period of extreme volatility about climate change that  has brought down successive prime ministers and left the country with enormous policy failures around climate, energy, renewables, you name it. If Rudd had had the courage of his convictions, or even just taken on the Green Party idea of a temporary carbon tax while an Emissions Trading Scheme was devised/an election held, none of this needed to have happened. And here we are. 

Why this matters? Because I think you can make an argument that Australia’s confusion and cynicism about climate change and politics is directly related to Rudd’s failure to pursue the climate agenda to the ballot box again, if needs be.,

Rudd had enjoyed going on and on about climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation” (which it is). People believed him. Rudd’s popularity remained stratospheric. Then, when people decided that Rudd had been using climate as just another “positioning issue,” they felt cheated, betrayed, taken for fools. Rudd’s personal approval ratings took a massive hit. Climate was the only issue, but it certainly was the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

So if you, as a political leader, are going to use climate change as an issue, you better bring your A game and if your A game doesn’t work, you better switch to your B game, which is as good as your A game. And if you don’t, you will cause havoc. And it is now harder than in Rudd’s day, because everyone is cynical, everyone is kinda terrified, whether they can articulate it to themselves or not.

Categories
Australia Ignored Warnings Industry Associations

January 20 (1992) Gambling on climate… and losing #auspol

On this day 30 years ago…, well, let me speculate. Imagine a middle-aged Australian businessman. Let’s call him Dave (“Dave-o” to his mates). Two kids, chasing his third tawdry affair with his fourth secretary, trying to dodge a second heart attack. Doctor telling him to cut back on the booze and the smoking.

Dave is sitting at the lunchtime talk of the CEDA in Australia, and he’s listening to the keynote speaker Don Carruthers of mining giant CRA (now Rio Tinto) say that the federal Government’s stance for the Rio Earth Summit in June – lead by that silly woman minister Ros Kelly – is going to threaten the Australian economy. And Dave’s next pay rise.

Here’s what the Australian newspaper reported the following day

Stewart, C. 1992. Green policies ‘flawed’. The Australian, January 21, p.3. 

“The Federal Government’s environmental proposals for the United Nations inaugural earth summit conference in Brazil in June are seriously flawed and run counter to our own economic interests, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia heard yesterday. Mr Don Carruthers, a director and group executive of mining giant CRA Ltd, told a CEDA lunch in Melbourne that the Australian stance in the lead-up to the Rio de Janeiro conference – which will be the world’s largest environment forum – would, if adopted, pose a direct threat to the international competitiveness of our economy.”

Let’s imagine, Dave is sat there, hearing Don Carruthers fulminate, and he remembers that before coming to the event he had, uncharacteristically, idly leafed through the Canberra Times (one of the more serious newspapers in Australia).

On page three, he had seen the following. 

Anon, 1992. Greenhouse cynics gambling with future. Canberra Times, 20 January. 

“One of the CSIRO’s top scientists says doubters of the greenhouse effect are gambling with the future of the world. Dr Graeme Pearman, coordinator of the CSIRO’s climate change research program, said yesterday there was little doubt global warming was a reality according to all the best scientific models.”

I wonder how Dave reconciled these two items. Does he decide that he’s 45 or 50 in a position of authority, but not necessarily power and there’s no margin in rocking the boat? That it might not be happening, anyway. Is he gonna think about being able to retire and leave the problem  – if it exists – for his teenage children, who’ve been on the demonstrations have encouraged him to join Greenpeace and buy recycled toilet paper, to deal with?

Which way does Dave-o jump? Any given individual might jump one way or the other. They might struggle (see Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg’s book about Australian middle-managers at a later date). 

But ultimately, as a species, as a society, as a political class, we know which way Australia jumped – towards ever more fossil fuel exports, and disdaining the domestic possibilities of renewables until the late 2000s.

As a species, it turns out that we lost Pearman’s gamble. What would you say to those people, to Dave, if you could have them here now for five minutes?

Categories
Carbon Capture and Storage Energy Europe Industry Associations Technophilia

Jan 19 (2015) -Four utilities pull out of an EU CCS programme…

On this day, Jan 19, in 2015 “four of Europe’s biggest power utilities, represented in Brussels by Eurelectric, have decided to leave the European Commission’s CCS Technology Platform ZEP.“

The four were Germany’s RWE AG, France’s Electricite de France, Sweden’s Vattenfall AB and Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa.

The ZEP had been set up in the mid-2000s as “a coalition of companies, scientists and environmental groups seeking ways to capture and bury heat-trapping carbon emissions mainly from the exhausts of coal, oil and gas-fired power plants.”

[On the EU’s “Zero Emissions Power Plant Programme”. See also 2011 article in Nature about Europe and CCS.]

Why? Well, money at stake. As a Bellona press release titled “Utilities feign interest in CCS to get public bail out” said

“Of the move, Bellona Europa Director Jonas Helseth said: – In their poorly concealed attempts to attain capacity payments, Europe’s utilities have misused the trust of the European Commission and Europe’s CCS community. It’s shameless how Eurelectric proudly announces the formation of a new CCS taskforce and ‘calls on policymakers to push ahead’, while simultaneously pulling out of Europe’s largest and widest coalition working on CCS.”

What happened next

Is there any CCS? 

Why this matters.

We keep assuming we can deploy these technologies at massive scale, rapidly, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s one of the ways we avoid looking at how much some of us are emitting.  There is trouble ahead.

Categories
Australia Green Jobs

Jan 18 (1993) Job’s not a good un. “Green Jobs in Industry Plan” achieves … nothing. #auspol

On this day in 1993 the Australian Conservation Foundation (sort of akin to the UK version of Friends of the Earth) and the Australian Council of Trade Unions  (akin to the TUC) released a joint statement about the environment and employment.

As Noakes (1993) reports – 

“A major new effort to develop jobs which protect the environment”, was how the January 18 joint statement by the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Australian Conservation Foundation described their joint Green Jobs in Industry Plan. The scheme was launched at the Visyboard Paper and Cardboard Recycling Plant in Melbourne by Peter Baldwin, minister for higher education and employment services.”

This came at the tail end of concern about “Ecologically Sustainable Development.” Its champion, Bob Hawke, had been toppled, the new Prime Minister (Paul Keating) was not – to put it mildly – a fan of environmentalists and their concerns. The whole thing must have seemed doomed (and it was).

What happened next? Well, does Australia have the environmental jobs sector it could/should have? Or the carbon tax (the ACTU had a role, in 1995, of scuppering one).

Why this matters – we need to realise that getting greenies and union types together is a lot harder than it looks/”should” be. We need to think about previous failed efforts, and why they failed. But we tend not to, because it would raise awkward questions and make us feel bad.

References

Noakes, F. (1993) ACTU and ACF launch green jobs program. Green Left Weekly January 27th

Categories
Guest post Religion

January 17th – A religious perspective on climate action

Guest post by Reverend Grace Thomas (bio below)

On January 17th 2007, fifteen years ago today, a joint letter was penned and signed by scientists and evangelical leaders in the US, in which they stated ‘We declare that every sector of our nation’s leadership—religious, scientific, business, political, and educational—must act now to work toward the fundamental change in values, lifestyles, and public policies required to address these worsening problems before it is too late. There is no excuse for further delays.’

In the autumn of last year, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion, came together for the first time to make a joint statement.  In their statement, they warned of the urgency of environmental sustainability, its impact on poverty, and the importance of global cooperation. Pope Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and the Archbishop of Canterbury together asked people to pray, stating ‘We call on everyone to endeavour to listen to the cry of the earth and of people who are poor, examining their behaviour and pledging meaningful sacrifices for the sake of the earth which God has given us.’

What does a faith perspective offer in a climate emergency? What should Christians be saying and doing? 

Full disclosure – I am a CofE priest in England. My response to these statements comes unapologetically from this perspective. The first statement is from the US, which is a very different faith context to here in the UK. So, this is a personal reflection on what faithful response to climate issues can be. It won’t be to everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s all I have to give. 

I mentioned in a recent book (1) that I’d had a conversation with a minister who expressed reticence about engaging with ‘green issues’ as they were worried about the time this would take away from mission and evangelism – from the work of getting people into church. It is a fundamental calling of Christians to reach out and grow disciples, but it is also a fundamental calling to steward creation. The former seems to take precedence in a way that sounds dangerously close to a capitalist approach at times – grow quick, numbers matter, income is key and so on. Prioritising growth has, in the secular world, led to a lot of the issues we now face in the climate crisis. In Church, we are now given statistics and targets to meet regarding congregational growth. This, I fear, leads to the very discussion I had with the minister – where creation care is seen as an additional burden, rather than integral to our calling.

This is a complex issue. I am friends with some wonderful Christian activists who, whilst the wider Church has seemed slow and silent, have taken action and raised the profile of the climate emergency and pushed the conversation into the wider sphere. They have been jailed and risked much in their activism and I deeply admire them. But I also know that, sometimes, the rush to activism has left people behind, has antagonised others, and has spoken from too narrow a perspective, and revealed white western privilege and bias. And, my own rush to ‘do’ has pushed me close to burnout.

When I read the two statements above – the one from fifteen years ago, and the one from last year and my gut reaction was – well, nothing much has changed, has it? We have said a lot, but what have we actually done? But, then, I noticed something. A fundamental difference between the two statements, that caused me to pause. The first statement calls, unequivocally, for action. The second, however, calls for us to listen, to reflect and then to respond. 

Maybe, what we should be doing, as a Church is much more listening. We need to listen with our whole heart to the earth as it groans and feel that within our soul. We need to stop and give our full attention to the cries of our siblings across the world. We need to put our hands in the soil, inhale the air, wade into the waters, and remember our place within creation and our intrinsic connection to the land, the seas, and to each other. 

Alastair McIntosh, a quaker and environmentalist, writes a lot about this and acknowledges that such contemplation, such reconnection with our deeper selves and the earth, will not impact immediately on climate change (2). Indeed, it may be very frustrating for people who see the urgency of the climate emergency and hear this call to listen as another way of pushing action further down the line whilst the earth and many of our neighbours suffer. I understand that and feel it. The Church is very good at talking about things and not taking the radical action that is often needed. I can’t pretend I have all the answers to any of this. 

Intentional listening and discernment, however, is not inaction. And, through it may emerge a deeper understanding of what it means to live in a world on the precipice of ecological breakdown. With this, words from the Church may be less weighed down by soundbites and hold greater integrity, and faithful action may become more inclusive, more compassionate, more meaningful and more sustainable.

References

(1) Thomas, G and Coleman, M (2021). Climate action as mission. Cambridge: Grove Books

(2) McIntosh, A (2020) Riders on the Storm. Edinburgh: Berlinn ltd

Biography

Grace Thomas is an Anglican priest in Manchester Diocese, where she is also a Diocesan Environment Officer. She is also a programme lead and tutor at Luther King Centre Theological College. Grace has co-authored the Grove book ‘Climate Action as Mission’ and has also contributed a chapter to Hannah Malcolm’s book ‘Words for a Dying World’. She regularly appears on BBC Radio Four as a Daily Service presenter and on Radio Two as a Pause for Thought contributor. Grace is currently a doctoral student looking at pastoral responses to the climate emergency

Categories
Weekly updates

The Week Ahead 17th Jan to 23rd Jan 2022 (Week #03 update)

Welcome to week 03 of “All Our Yesterdays – 365 climate histories.”

Last week saw the 50th anniversary of the release of “A Blueprint for Survival”, which I am fascinated by – how it was received, what happened next. But the anniversary passed without notice or discussion – oh well!

One of the success metrics (not the most important, is to have 2000 Twitter followers by the end of the year. Moved from 64 or whatever to 84. Hmm – have followed some more people, but this is going to be a slog, obvs.

Another is to have 50 guest posts, with 25 of those by people of colour, and for 25 of all the guest posts to be by people who identify either as non-binary or female. For January, we will be on track with both those.

As ever, keen to hear from people who are up for proof-reading, proposing dates, writing guest posts…

What you may have missed in the last week on the site

A Blueprint for Survival report was the biggie!

What I’ve been reading/watching/listening to

Whatever Happened to the UK Youth Climate Strikes? by Clare Hymer 15 February 2021

Whatever Happened to the UK Youth Climate Strikes?

HBr Flow Batteries: long term storage for grids, compatible with hydrogen by January 13, 2022 by Helena Uhde and Veronika Spurná

HBr Flow Batteries: long term storage for grids, compatible with hydrogen

What’s coming up in the next week on the site

Rather a lot of Australia stuff, I am afraid, back to 1992, 2010 and so on. But also – and am super-proud of this – the second guest post on the site, going up tomorrow, and on religion…

What’s coming up in the next week in the real world

A couple of select committee hearings of note, if you are in the UK…

On Tuesday 18th Jan from 1030

Formal meeting (oral evidence session): Energy National Policy Statements

On Weds 19th Jan from 2pm

Formal meeting (oral evidence session): Sustainability of the built environment

Categories
Australia Predatory delay

Jan 16, 1995: There’s power in a (corporate) union #auspol

On this day 27 years ago corporate interests met in Canberra (political capital of Australia) in their ongoing struggle against a dreaded (although tiny) proposed carbon tax. The business press had the story – 

Callick, R. 1995. Industry forces gather to slow carbon tax momentum. Australian Financial Review, 16 January, p.8.

REPRESENTATIVES of a substantial group of Australian industries meet in Canberra today to draft a joint response to invitations issued by the Minister for the Environment, Senator Faulkner, for separate talks over the next fortnight on his carbon tax proposal.

I could go on and on about this (in fact, I once did).

What happened next – Faulkner withdrew his proposal. The idea of a tax in and of itself mostly died (though see the Greens’ proposal in the aftermath of Kevin Rudd failing to get the CPRS through). Australia still doesn’t price carbon.

Why this matters. It’s good to see how business interests combine and co–ordinate their efforts.  It turns out, that, as the song goes, “there’s power in a union.” Especially a union of corporate giants. Who knew.

Categories
Agnotology anti-reflexivity Greenwash Predatory delay Propaganda United States of America

Jan 15 1971: greenwash before it was called greenwash #propaganda

On this day in 1971, at the conference of the “Economic Council of the Forest Products Industry” in  Phoenix Arizona some chap called Richard W. Darrow gave a speech “Communication in an Environmental Age”

“We will do those things that earn us attention and gain us understanding, or we will live out the remainder of our professional lives in the creeping, frustrating, stultifying, stifling grasp of unrealistic legislative restraints and crippling administrative restriction. A public that ought to understand us – and thank us for what we are and what we do – will instead clamor for our scalps.”

There was, as you can see, a real panic in business circles. The fear was that previously quiescent ‘citizens’, at first cowed by so-called “McCarthyism”[it pre-dated that drunk] and then stupefied by consumerism – might actually get up on their hind legs. If they demanded real regulation, real control, so the planet didn’t get turned into an uninhabitable slagheap, then the fun times (for business) would be over. In 1971, before neoliberalism, before pervasive computing, before all the other wonders that the last 51 years have brought us, such fears were legit.

What has happened since? The kinds of “public relations” “professionals” Darrow represented have honed their game. Seven months later, the Powell Memorandum and the rise of the neoliberal think tanks. The crushing of labour unions, the spectacularisation of everything (to go all Debord for a minute). Greenwash, the constraining of imagination, the destruction of hope. Yeah, it’s not looking good for our species, is it?

“Source: Conley, J. (2006) , ENVIRONMENTALISM CONTAINED: A HISTORY OF CORPORATE RESPONSES

TO THE NEW ENVIRONMENTALISM. PhD thesis   

Conley, 2006: p69-70.  

Conley continues – “Having established a special unit to provide services on environmental health issues in 1966, Hill & Knowlton became a leading advocate and provider of environmental PR in the 1970s and beyond.”

See also

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky

Taking the Risk out of Democracy by Alex Carey

Global Spin by Sharon Beder

This isn’t just a battle of “ideas”: this gets very ‘kinetic’

The War against the Greens: The Wise-Use Movement, the New Right, and Anti-Environmental Violence by David Helvarg

FT 12th January 2022  Activists target public relations groups for greenwashing fossil fuels

Categories
Activism Ignored Warnings United Kingdom

1972, Jan 14: “A Blueprint for Survival” hits the headlines

[Update 31st January – see foot of this post for comment by David Taylor]

On Friday 14th January 1972 a bombshell report, ‘A Blueprint for Survival,’ was released onto an increasingly worried world. Produced by the team at The Ecologist, it laid out not just the environmental and social problems, but also offered – the clue is in the name – a blueprint for survival.

Fifty years is a nice round number for reflecting, and this 30 page report [pdf, word.doc] is designed to help with that.

It explains little of the background to the report – the world it entered, who wrote it, how it was received

It doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about what the Blueprint actually says – read it yourself!

It does however talk about what happened next – what the media response, and the political response was [spoilers – scientists warning of trouble ahead will be derided as scare-mongerers, the public’s attention span is short, it’s really hard to ‘capture the moment’ – to do so you need absorptive capacity up the wazoo].

For any Doctor Who fans out there – there’s mention of two classic Pertwee stories.

It then talks a bit about the longer-term, and the birth of the “Ecology Party” (now known as the Green Party), before turning to some of the lessons we might learn around

  1. Abeyance
  2. Absorptive Capacity
  3. Arrogance

Would love to hear people’s comments

Comment received on 31st January 2022 by one of the people behind the excellent “Green History UK” website.

I’ve read your article and it’s got loads of good perspectives. Hopefully we can add that to the site as well.

I trust you won’t mind if I draw your attention to one or two issues where I have a different perspective:-

  1. The founders of PEOPLE always wrote the name in capitals, not lower case.
  2. They did not, initially call themselves a ‘political party’.  If you look at the early PEOPLE literature you will see that they were always just called ‘PEOPLE’. On some occasions (as on the material advertising the Jigsaw Conference) they referred to themselves as a ‘movement’. . Lesley W had researched the issue and found that you didn’t have to be a ‘party’ to contest an election, so they weren’t. It was others, particularly journalists, who referred to them as a ‘party’, because they contested elections. This later led to PEOPLE referring to themselves as both a ‘movement’ and a ‘party’.
  3. In that it intended to contest elections Movement for Survival was as much a ‘party’ as PEOPLE. The two movements had similar strategies.  This isn’t surprising as PEOPLE arose directly from Survival. The similarity wasn’t just because PEOPLE took over Movement’s box of contacts. The PEOPLE founders were also supporters of Movement and the Whittakers, in particular, had been meeting with Teddy throughout 1972. Teddy told me back then how delighted he was to have found a group of professional people (estate agent, solicitors) to take over Movement. There was no formal handover but the reality was that PEOPLE grew directly out of Movement, and took it over. There is a widespread misconception (reinforced by repetition) that the modern Green Party began when PEOPLE was publicly launched in February 1973. This ‘fact’ was one of the answers in a recent Mastermind quiz. The truth is that Survival’s launch, in the January edition of the Ecologist magazine, marked the actual beginning of the global movement of green parties.
  4. You describe Goldsmith as ‘authoritarian’. During his time he was labelled many things -all of them wrong really. There were no good labels for what he was espousing. This is understandable as he was originating a new political philosophy and it didn’t fit comfortably into any of the existing categories. You describe Blueprint as promoting ‘radical de-centralisation’. I think this phrase better describes Teddy’s outlook. He was, after all, a big admirer of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin…

Thank you for what you’re doing. We need this history!

Very best,

David (Taylor)

Categories
UNFCCC United Nations

2005, January 13: UN Secretary-General calls for “decisive measures” on climate change

On this day, 17 years ago, the UN Secretary-General called for “decisive measures” on climate change. 

“PORT LOUIS, MAURITIUS, 13 January — The United Nations Conference convened here to address the economic and environmental vulnerabilities of small island developing States opened its high-level segment today, with Secretary-General Kofi Annan calling for ‘decisive measures’ against climate change and a global early warning system in the wake of last month’s Asian tsunami disaster.”

[Link]

What happened next.  Oh, lots of decisive measures.  And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you, in Sydney.

Why it matters. People keep investing hope in these international processes, as if someone is gonna arrive to save them. God help us all (see what I did there?). What Annan could have said was “The UNFCCC process is a farce. The lack of targets and timetables in the Framework Convention – because of Uncle Sam doing what Uncle Sam always does – means it’s a relentless talking shop.  Probably in 16 years they’ll still be holding ‘last chance to save the planet’ meetings. I mean, wtaf.