On March 23 1989, cold fusion was announced by a couple of overexcited scientists. (the gory details of why they came to be releasing this when they did can be found here).
The implication in fusion (hot or cold, but especially cold) is of limitless energy, which sounds like a good idea until you start thinking about how infantile human societies would actually use that limitless energy: we would just intensify our exploitation/exploration. [Comedy fact, the Portuguese have one word that covers both of those].
And limitless energy would accelerate our doom in all probability without some serious wisdom in our institutions. And I see no evidence of any wisdom in our institutions. (There may have been some, but we have moron-ified ourselves over the last 40 years or more.)
But anyway, this particular bout of cold fusion was quickly debunked, and there were many articles and books about what it all “meant.” Science and Technology Studies was then a relatively new thing.
On this day, March 22 2012, exactly 10 years ago, the then new organisation 350.org, held a flash mob on a university campus in Canada to try to drum up interest in its divestment from fossil fuels activities.
On March 22nd, approximately 30 students met on campus at 1pm with their ipods ready. At 1:10, we pressed play simultaneously and followed the instructions on the 14 minute long mp3. The energy was high, and curious onlookers were already starting to gather. THREE, TWO, ONE, START! The voice told us about the horrors of climate change while we participated in a giant shoulder massage train. Later we caused a stir in a high-traffic area on campus with 2 minutes to high five as many non-participants as possible. http://350.org/flash-mobs-and-mysterious-mp3s-tools-raise-climate-awareness-yes-please/
This was not a big or important event. And I mention it because it’s 10 years ago and flash mobs are so over. And 350.org has had a fairly typical story of late in that it tried to expand too quickly and has had to pull its horns in. And it continues to have the same problems that all the big green organisations have around black and ethnic minority representation. And this has been going on since – well this has been spoken of – the late 80s, early 90s. And of course it’s been going on even longer than that.
Meanwhile, about flash mobs: Repertoires get old fast, but they continue to be used after they have lost their novelty value because people struggled to innovate understandably and you want to sweat your assets. In some ways. NGOs and civil society organisations are under the same forces as big industrial outfits you have skill sets repertoires things that feel and are “right” and you keep doing them. And that isn’t automatically a bad thing. You know, you wouldn’t want to have surgery from a surgical team that had given up on hand-washing, because that was an old thing. Some things are really, really worth keeping. But at the same time, you wouldn’t want the surgery from a surgeon who hadn’t learned anything from his failures, or an anaesthetist or nurses who hadn’t kept up with the latest research. And we’re still using techniques which were proven to be less effective than more recent ones. Now, the analogy of the human body in a society is an old one. And the analogy I’m telling around in a medical innovation and social movement, innovation is not perfect. That’s because it’s an analogy, a metaphor. See the 1931 Robert Frost essay about this….
“All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself”
On this day in March 21 1994 is an important and ironic day for climate action. Two things happened that tell you a lot about where we are.
This was the day on which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change became international law. And it was secondly, the day that Singleton Council in New South Wales said yes to another coal fired power station over the protestations of Greenpeace, Australia.
So, on that first one: there had been the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the requisite number of nations, including the United States and Australia had ratified the treaty. And this all took place a little bit quicker than a lot of people expected, (which left the Manchester Global Forum as basically an irrelevance – it had been plotted when the assumption was that it would take several more years for Rio to become a “thing”.)
At the end of 1992, when Australia ratified the UNFCCC, it had also launched the National Greenhouse Response Strategy, full of vague platitudes (all the real commitments and ideas had been killed off in the committees beforehand, rendering the “Ecologically Sustainable Development” process of 1990-1991 useless).
And you can argue that the federal system in Australia makes it impossible to get strong, coordinated action on climate. And maybe there’s an element of truth to that, but the federal government didn’t even bloody try.
And the Singleton coal fired power plant is a really good example of how we can pat ourselves on the back for passing international laws, while on literally the same day pursuing the path that will give the light to all our fine words. Greenpeace did their best, they had a court case. They lost it later that year.
And the Singleton coal fired power station has had a long life, which is more than you can say, perhaps for children born in the year 2030, or 40.
On this day in 2014 the Queensland Resources Council (a club for the miners etc) decides to try to smear… WWF. Why? Because WWF has the outright temerity to say all might not be well with the Great Barrier Reef and that it ought to be protected a bit more. And here we are.
On same day – Milman, O. 2014. Mining industry accuses WWF of lying about threat to Great Barrier Reef. Guardian, 20 March. The Queensland mining industry has launched a blistering attack on WWF, accusing it of running an untruthful Great Barrier Reef campaign that could jeopardise the reef’s world heritage status. Michael Roche, the chief executive of the Queensland Resources Council, said he has noticed a “dramatic change in approach” from WWF since it joined the Australian Marine Conservation Society to launch the Fight for the Reef campaign.
Classy.
What it all means – well, those with the money want to keep making money (doh). And they regard environmental regulations as unnecessary red tape. And they want to make it harder for civil society to advocate for these things. They’ll often pretend to be in favour of “protection” as long as it is vague and “balanced.” What makes this incident interesting is that the mining lobby isn’t just going after the “crazed hippies” but as establishment an outfit as WWF – albeit by insinuating that they’ve fallen under the spell of crazed hippies.
We can laugh, but this sort of attack has been, historically, a tremendously powerful tool in the armoury of those doing “predatory delay.”
So glad I did not breed. The second half of the twenty-first century is going to make the first half of the twentieth century look like a golden age of peace, love and understanding. If, in fact, we have another thirty years to begin to find out…
On this day in 1990, while up for re-election Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke spoke to scientists at the opening the CSIRO Atmospheric Research Building, Aspendale Victoria.
“In the late 1980s, political leaders (Jones, Hawke and Richardson) publicly interacted with the CSIRO scientists and division advisory boards. From that advisory board, Bob Chynoweth personally briefed the prime minister, according to a Hawke speech to the division on 19 March 1990 (Hawke 1990).”
One of the ironies of that election campaign (which was the only time I voted, I think, in Australia) was that the Liberal National Party actually had a more ambitious carbon dioxide reduction target than the ALP….
Hawke was re-elected, with the help of small g-green votes (the Greens did not exist yet). He was making some of the right noises about climate and environment, but was toppled by his former Treasurer, Paul Keating, who most definitely did not care about “greenie” issues or votes…
On March 18 2010, Ian McEwan’s novel Solar was released .McEwan is a well-regarded prominent English novelist, who has been publishing from the 70s onwards
Solar was his – good in my opinion, fwiw – , attempt at a novel about innovation, masculinity and the common problems of collective action,
People will quibble about whether it’s a good novel or whether it is “fair” to some of these issues. But if you’re looking for something that will make you think and make you laugh and make you wince, then Solar is a good place to go.
It would have made a very good movie or TV series, but probably was published too late to benefit from the whole climate window of 2006 to 2010…
Why this matters.
We don’t have many good novels about technology, innovation, bureaucracy (!) – try also Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men. Also check out Ben Elton’s Stark, if you like…
On the 18th of March 1968, Robert Kennedy Jr. brother of slain president John F Kennedy, and campaigning for the Democratic nomination for that job himself, gave a speech in which he said
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman‘s rifle and Speck‘s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.
The context was one of growing concern about environmental problems. It would be interesting to find out where that speech came from, and if it’s been written about actually.
Why this matters
The fetish of growth and GDP as a metric that overwhelms all else is with us still today, and will be the death of us. If you measure the wrong thing, and you measure success by the wrong thing, you’ll get the wrong result.
And there’s that Bertram Gross quote, from his 1980 book “Friendly Fascism”
“If we just enlarge the pie, everyone will get more”. This has been the imagery of Capitalist growthmanship since the end of World War II- and I once did my share in propagating it. But the growth of the pie did not change the way the slices were distributed except to enlarge the absolute gap between the lion’s share and the ant’s. And whether the pie grows, or stops growing, or shrinks, there are always people who suffer from the behaviour of the cooks, the effluents from the oven, the junkiness of the pie, and the fact that they needed something more nutritious than pie anyway.”
What happened next?
Well, a couple of weeks later, Kennedy was giving a statement after the assassination of Martin Luther King, assassination of Martin Luther King. And two months after that, he himself was assassinated.
On this day in 2007 perhaps a hundred people attended a climate action gathering in central Edinburgh, Scotland. At that time I was a student in Glasgow, so I travelled over for the event, along with some friends. Rising Tide Scotland coordinated the day, which involved workshops, plenaries, and film screenings.
My memories are hazy and there is very little information about the event that remains online. Nevertheless I can tell you about some recollected snippets from the day, and I can put the event in some context.
The context of Scottish climate activism in 2007
March 2007 was a period of significant concern about climate change in the UK. The 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (physical science basis) was released with stark warnings in February 2007. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth documentary had made some impact in 2006. Public concern was growing and the UN Kyoto Protocol’s flaws were becoming more obvious.
We had not yet been hit by the global financial crisis which shifted public attention elsewhere (Northern Rock collapsed in September 2007). Nor had we yet been demoralised by the intense failure of the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen (COP15).
The organisers of this gathering, Rising Tide Scotland, were involved in Climate Camp, which promoted actions of civil disobedience at sites of major polluting infrastructure, including Drax coal fired power station (August 2006) and Heathrow airport (August 2007).
Rising Tide Scotland, among others, sought to build climate activism from among the Scottish anti-war and alter-globalisation left that had mobilised against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and against the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005.
In parallel, electoral strategies by the Scottish Green Party and the Scottish Socialist Party had led to significant representation in the devolved Scottish Parliament in 2003, albeit this ebbed away for the Greens in the May 2007 election and ended disastrously for the Socialists, who had been split by the ongoing Tommy Sheridan debacle.
Memories of the climate action gathering, March 17th 2007
These are hazy and partial, so if others have better recollections, perhaps they could leave a reply in the comments. I remember being excited about the day. There is a desire to learn, engage and connect, which activist groups should always be able to tap into.
The event took place in the premises connected to the Forest Cafe, which was then housed in an amazing, centrally located listed building that was a hub for arts and events, supported by volunteers and not-for-profit initiatives. This lasted until 2011, when the building was sold after the charitable owners went bankrupt. The Forest moved to a much smaller premises in 2012. I arrived early and had a coffee (vegan milk only).
In the workshops, I vaguely remember learning about some things I already knew, and hearing some things that I was not aware of. There were some interactive elements, including a memorable use of a ‘strength line’ in a breakout session. This involved people physically moving closer to one side of a room or another, depending on how much they agreed or disagreed with a proposition for debate. People could move during the debate, so you could see how it was going. One of the discussions was about technology, and at that time I was pretty sceptical about technological solutions, so I raised my hand to speak. I said something about technology getting us into this climate change problem and therefore not expecting technology to get us out of it, and found to my surprise that more people had moved away from my favoured position and towards the opposite!
I remember another workshop introducing people to non-violent direct action (NVDA), led by someone who was advocating this approach. For some reason – probably because I was learning analytical philosophy in my first year of university – I decided to quibble with the speaker in the Q&A about whether destruction of property could be considered violent. I think he had in mind destruction of polluting corporate infrastructure, and I had in mind personal property, so we ended up speaking at cross-purposes.
Aside from that, I remember seeing some familiar faces, and lots of unfamiliar faces. To my surprise, one of my philosophy lecturers, Prof Alan Carter, a specialist in environmental ethics, spoke with the microphone from among the rows in one of the gatherings. I suppose this confirmed to me that I was somehow in the right place, even if I was not yet much good at debating. It’s just very disappointing that the climate crisis has become so much worse since then.
On this day in 1995, the Victorian government said it would spend taxpayers money on brown coal and trying to making power stations that used it 30% more efficient in a joint venture.
“THE Victorian Government is to participate in the country’s largest research and development syndicate, a $100 million joint venture for research which could make the State’s four baseload brown coal power stations up to 30 per cent more efficient. The syndicate arranged by Bain and Company includes Perth entrepreneur Mr Kerry Stokes’ Australian Capital Equity as majority investor, with ABN Amro Australia , Mercantile Mutual , Babcock & Brown , and Deutsche Bank AG . The other investors are HRL Ltd – the former research arm of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, now 40 per cent owned by the State – and the SECV shell. The project announced yesterday by the Victorian Minister for Energy, Mr Jim Plowman, and HRL Ltd, to construct a 10 megawatt generation facility to test the commercial viability of new coal-burning technology, is funded under the Federal Government’s 150 per cent R&D tax concessions. The study will examine integrated drying, gasification and combined cycle (IDGCC) technology, which promises – by turning low-grade coal into coal gas – to cut electricity supply costs and reduce greenhouse gases by 25 per cent.” Pheasant, B. 1995. Vic takes stake in $100m coal R&D. The Australian Financial Review, 17 March, p.9.
The backstory is that Victoria has unimaginably vast reserves of brown coal. Brown coal is less pure than black coal. And when you burn it, you get a lot more mercury ash, C02 and general crap. This means that it’s a really poor thing to export as well. So Victoria has never been able to make a go of that, despite periodic speculative schemes.
If you want to know about the guy who brought coal to Melbourne as it were, that’d be John Monash (to simplify matters somewhat).
The backstory here is that in 1989, the State Electricity Commission of Victoria came up with a plan about how to deal with greenhouse, but then was privatised, and all of that went out the window.
Why this matters.
We should know that there have been promises of technological salvation, going back a very long time. This is neither a particularly old nor particularly recent one. But it is, to use a phrase that was popularised in Victoria, for another purpose, “a dumb way to die”.
What happened next?
Brown coal continued to be burnt and burnt. And the co2 continued to accumulate, which is of course how I finish most of these blog posts.
On this day in 2019, three years ago, inspired by Greta Thunberg, school students in New Zealand launched a school strike but had to basically call it off because of the Christchurch mosques massacres.
Thunberg had started her solitary school strikes in 2018 these as a tactic spread very quickly simultaneously with the rise of Extinction Rebellion.
What’s interesting about the Christchurch killer’s manifesto is it incorporates standard eco-fascist tropes into his justification for the mass murders that he committed
What happened next?
The school strikes came and went . XR rose and fell – up like a rocket down like a stick.
And here we are.
For the avoidance of confusion – I am not saying do nothing. I’m saying do something different or do the same thing differently. But there’s this utter utter unwillingness to innovate, and a comfort in just keeping on bleating out renditions of “Beasts of England”
