On this day, June 1979, the declaration at the end of the G7 Meeting in Tokyo contained this gem.
3. We pledge our countries to increase as far as possible coal use, production, and trade, without damage to the environment. We will endeavor to substitute coal for oil in the industrial and electrical sectors, encourage the improvement of coal transport, maintain positive attitudes toward investment for coal projects, pledge not to interrupt coal trade under long-term contracts unless required to do so by a national emergency, and maintain, by measures which do not obstruct coal imports, those levels of domestic coal production which are desirable for reasons of energy, regional and social policy. “We need to expand alternative sources of energy, especially those which will help to prevent further pollution, particularly increases of carbon dioxide and sulphur oxides in the atmosphere.” http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1979tokyo/communique.html
The G7 had started in the mid-70s, initially as a one-off meeting hosted by the French. Everyone was in a panic about the economy (stagflation), the uppityness (and yes, I mean that – freighted with all the horrors of white supremacism) of people of colour in the Majority World, and also the unruliness of the locals (strikes etc).
Why this matters.
Promises been going on a long time, haven’t they?
What happened next?
Climate was not there on the agenda in Venice 1980, and once Reagan came in, that was it – it would be another ten years before the G7 pretended to be green.
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 in 2000, the beserk but effective “Lavoisier Group” of Australian climate denialists schmoozed senior politicians (former Treasurer Peter Walsh, an ALP thumper, probably set this up).
The Lavoisier Group (named for a French chemist, because these groups are always – somewhat pathetically – trying to bolster their cred and signal their, ah, “erudition”) had been formed as a radical flank effort to try to stiffen John Howard’s resolve in keeping Australia from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. (Australia had, by various means, gotten a sweet sweet deal of an emissions “reduction” target of [checks notes] … a 10% INCREASE in emissions – see Clive Hamilton on this.]
“Last year, the Lavoisier Group held meetings around the country, including a June 27 dinner for a select group of federal parliamentarians in the House of Representatives’ dining room.”
Small groups of determined and well-connected people who are going to help other people stay rich can be surprisingly effective in blocking things. Who knew.
What happened next?
Lavoisier kept on being effective for as long as Howard was PM (though things got trickier for them by 2006 or so). They were an important building block for the climate denial “movement” that flourished from 2009 or so through to 2013 or so. They are still, bless them, publishing their idiocies.
On this day, June 26 in 1991, Australian journalist Maria Taylor gave a good example of how the wave of climate concern that had begun in 1988/9 was ending.(they always do).
STATE OF THE WORLD 1991. A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. Allen and Unwin. $19.95.
Reviewer: MARIA TAYLOR
A SYDNEY marketing man and sometime advisor to the environmental movement told me recently that these days it’s hard to sell business on sponsoring environmental projectsbecause “environment is not the flavour of the month any more”.
While sheer survival may top many a corporate agenda at the moment, it’s still a breathtakingly quaint notion to suppose that “the environment” is a media beat-up begun a year or so ago and now about run its course.
The implication is that just as soon as we can get the economy to behave again, it will be back to business as usual. A lot of people also believe in fairy tales….
The “Issue Attention Cycle” is a thing. You can think it is stupid, but that doesn’t change its thing-ness, and your need to think carefully about what you do within it to be able to keep doing things after it.
What happened next?
Maria Taylor wrote a PhD thesis. A good one It became this book: Global warming and climate change: what Australia knew and buried. You can read it here
On this day, June 25, across 6 years, we can watch a technology emerge from obscurity (see June 4 for how an issue goes through an arc).
Carbon capture and storage is the proposal to stop carbon dioxide molecules, released when you burn a hydrocarbon (oil, coal or gas), from getting into the atmosphere. I could go on, but I won’t…
On this day in 2002 the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) held an “ Improved Oil Recovery” Research Seminar.
Then, a year later the US, EU, 12 countries agreed to develop carbon capture technologies” – the grandly named “Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum” became a thing.
Then, five years after that, with CCS very high up the agenda in the UK, a Shell-sponsored CCS supplement turned up in the Guardian containing 14-articles, all focusing on CCS. Page 234 of Mander et al (2013)
Why this matters.
Technologies build up a head of, erm, steam. Or they don’t. It takes time for things to emerge. Then they work, or they don’t, or they do something else.
What happened next?
CCS? It went away. Then it came back, as fantasies do.
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.
On this day, June 24 in 1986, A New York television channel showed a documentary with the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title of “The Climate Crisis”-
“PICKING up where a high-school chemistry class might end, ”Nova,” the public-broadcasting science series, offers the nonmatriculating viewer an advanced course in worrying. The cause of the concern is all the carbon dioxide that’s being pumped into the industrialized and motorized air. The hour-long broadcast is called ”The Climate Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect,” at 9 tonight on Channel 13.
“The conclusion, conveyed with great authority by several big-league climatologists from government and private research organizations, is terrible: by the year 2000, the atmosphere and weather will grow warmer by several degrees and life – animal, plant, human – will be threatened. The experts say that melting ice caps, flooded cities, droughts in the corn belt and famine in the third world could result if the earth’s mean temperature rises by a mere two or three degrees.”
Mitgang, H. 1986. Earth’s Climatic Crisis Examined by ‘Nova’. New York Times, 24 June.
Why this matters.
Good to remember that serious efforts were being made. It’s too easy to tell stories about “then this politician did this, then this CEO did that”, and therefore public opinion changed to “x”.
It is an easy narrative device, and it is a career-helper AND it helps with this idea (comforting) that there is a bridge to storm to save the Titanic by grabbing the wheel and yanking.
Yeah, no.
What happened next?
Public education efforts continued. Two years later, eight years after she was first given credible warnings, Thatcher started saying the “right” words, as did George Bush. That went well, didn’t it?
On this day, 23rd June 1997, world “leaders” gathered in Rio for a meeting packed with self-congratulatory speeches, this one to celebrate (if that is the word), five years since the Rio Earth Summit. (The 1992 Rio Earth Summit is the one that gave us the Biodiversity Treaty and the UNFCCC).
In the US the American Petroleum Institute was taking out full page ads to put pressure on President Clinton. In Australia Clive Hamilton co-ordinated the release of an open letter from 131 economists about the cost-effectiveness of early action.
Meanwhile, this good reporting by an Aussie journo gives you a sense of what happened. (John Howard didn’t go to Rio +5, but then his predecessor Paul Keting had not gone to Rio itself).
John Howard was too busy meeting Baroness Thatcher to attend Earth Summit II in New York this week. It was a controversial decision in light of our position on greenhouse gases.
FIRST thing on Monday morning, as Earth Summit II began in New York, the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, brought his huge bulk into the chamber of the United Nations General Assembly – the venue for the biggest environment conference since the Rio Summit in 1992.
A few minutes later, the US Vice- President, Al Gore, made a passionate but carefully worded speech welcoming delegates from over 70 countries. For a few minutes he even wandered into the throng on the floor of the General Assembly, and took a seat with the rest of the US delegation.
Both of these leaders were having a back-slappingly, hands-hakingly good time. Both seemed to be making the most of the opportunity to meet and talk with other leaders. For both men the reason for their presence was because they have a political imperative to make a statement about their concern for the environment.
James Woodford, Leaders Warm To The Task. Sydney Morning Herald, 28 June 1997
Why this matters.
They pile promise upon promise, don’t they? Maybe the promises are what the Angel of History is seeing, as part of the wreckage upon wreckage hurled in front of his feet?
What happened next?
The next big event in the circuit was COP3, in Kyoto. An agreement was made that – as per the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities agreed at Rio – rich countries would go first in cutting emissions. The US and Australia never went with it. The fossil fuel use exploded. The atmospheric concentrations went up and up.
On this day 22nd June, 1976, the Times (pre-Murdoch) ran a story with the headline “World’s temperature likely to rise”’, buried at the bottom of page 9.
“A warning that significant rises in global temperature are probable over the next century has been issued here [Geneva] by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
This would be the consequence of a build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide – which has already risen by 10 per cent in the past 50 years – because of increased use of oil and coal fuels.”
WMO were, it turns out, having a spat with the “Ice Age is coming” folks…
Why this matters.
We. Knew. Enough. To. Be. Worried. And taking action, by the late 1970s. This was not a deep dark state secret. This was in the fricking newspapers.
What happened next?
Sank without trace. In 1979 the WMO held the First World Climate Conference, also in Geneva. Momentum, but not enough to survive the arrival of the Thatchers and Reagans of this world…
I walked out the first time I saw it, because I was an eighteen year old moron with no idea of what he was seeing.
Anyway, spoilers – this is an homage to Chinatown, but with cartoons’s about a conspiracy to kill off public transport and force everyone into cars.
And there’s folks out there who will quibble (waves at Cameron) or, in fact present counter-arguments, but you know, National City Lines was a thing. This sort of stuff does, in essence, happen.
If you like your politics and economics in cartoon form.
Why this matters.
These are cognitive maps, if we choose to use them. Mostly we choose not to. So it goes.
