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Science Scientists

March 26, 1979 – Exxon meets a climate scientist

On this day in 1979, a few weeks after the end of the First World Climate Conference, Wally Broecker, the oceanographer met with Exxon scientists who were studying climate change and fossil fuels.

Broecker, to his apparent dismay, had coined the had been the first to use the term global warming in an academic context. (According to Alice Bell’s book “Our Biggest Experiment”, he  offered 200 bucks to anyone who could find an earlier example so he wouldn’t be lumbered with the unwanted title. 

Broecker also famously later compared the climate system to a sleeping beast and suggested that we stop poking it with a sharp stick.

What’s Exxon in all this? Well, “Exxon knew”. Exxon was doing its own studies of the climate problem, the carbon dioxide problem in the late 70s, early 80s. And this involved talking to scientists who knew what they were talking about. And Broecker most certainly was one of the scientists who really knew what he was talking about 

You can read more about this at the truly excellent “Inside Climate News”

Wallace Broecker

See also the page on Inside Climate News about “Exxon: The Road not taken.”

Exxon: The Road Not Taken

Why this matters

We need to remember that Exxon knew, and that scientists, quite rightly will talk to different constituencies they are paid out of taxpayer funding, and they should talk to not just the grassroots groups, but the biggies. And we need to know that in 1979, there were people seriously worried about climate. And these weren’t just hippies living in communes. This was the elite and it would be another 9 or 10 years before the issue would successfully break through and the co2 concentration had gone up and more kit had been built, and more norms around production and consumption had been established. And yes, yes, the population had gone up too;  we have two problems. The one that we in the West really need to do something about is overconsumption, exploitation, imperialism, hyper-extractivism, murder, you name it. And once we’ve done all of that, and paid reparations, then we can start to lecture other people about having too many babies.

Categories
International processes IPCC Science

March 25, 1988- World Meteorological Organisation sends IPCC invites.

On this day in 1988 the World Meteorological Organisation, (the clue is in the name) sent out invites to be part of what is now known as the IPCC

“In the absence of an official US initiative, WMO took the lead and held discussions with UNEP on this proposal. Eventually, a slightly modified version was sent out by the Secretary General of WMO on March 25, 1988 to member governments inquiring whether their country would like to be represented on a proposed ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ (Obasi, 1988).”

Agrawala, S. (1998a, p 615)

The context is this

The discovery of the ozone “hole” gave atmospheric scientists a high profile and trust.  Atmospheric scientists had finally decided at a meeting hosted by WMO, UNEP and ICSCU,, in Villach, Austria, in October 1985, that the carbon dioxide problem they had been studying and talking about in-depth for roughly 15 years, needed proper policy responses

The right-wing administration of the US “President” Ronald Reagan was split, but mostly opposed to this. They DEFINITELY did not want independent scientists pushing them around.  So, we get an intergovernmental panel rather than an international one.  They key sources – but by no means the only ones –  for this, are

Agrawala, S. Context and Early Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climatic Change 39, 605–620 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005315532386

Agrawala, S. Structural and Process History of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climatic Change 39, 621–642 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005312331477


What happened next

The IPCC first met in November 1988, in Geneva. Within a year and a half its first assessment report was ready. It was, of course, attacked and enormous attempts were made to water it down.  Things really got heated (ho ho) when the second assessment report came out.  That was very very nasty indeed…

Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide accumulates

Categories
Fossil fuels Greenwash United States of America

March 24, 1989 – Exxon Valdez vs Alaska. (EV wins)

On the March 24 1989, the Exxon Valdez, ran aground in Alaska. Another of the consequential oil spills like the Torrey Canyon (1967) , and the one in the March 1978 (the Amoco Cadiz).

 And that was followed, of course, by Deepwater Horizon. 

And the thing to remember is that it’s not the accidents that are the problem, itt’s the normal operating of the system. So here Imma point you at the Onion article about “Millions Of Barrels Of Oil Safely Reach Port In Major Environmental Catastrophe”

What’s interesting about the Valdez is it was probably the last time we thought things could be better. It spurred in the short term, Exxon to run a very effective publicity campaign about people scrubbing individual rocks and birds. And there was more loose talk about double hold oil tankers. In the longer term, they fought a successful ish rearguard action via the legal system and academia. And here we are. 

Then in 1997, one of my favourite references to this disaster is the Exxon is the movie Good Will Hunting where as part of his monologue about the dots between the National Security Agency and everyone getting fucked over, Matt Damon makes reference to a drunk captain who wants to slalom with the icebergs.

Check out the post for the 26th March, btw

Categories
Energy Science Scientists United States of America

March 23, 1989 – cold fusion!!

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.

And the following day…

Categories
Activism

March 22, 2012 – flash mobs and repertoire exhaustion

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”

But I am digressing…

Categories
Australia

March 21, 1994 – Yes to UNFCCC, yes to more coal-fired plants. Obviously. #auspol

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.

Categories
Australia

March 20, 2014 – industry groups monster reef defenders

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…

Categories
Australia

March 19, 1990 – Bob Hawke gives #climate speech

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.

As Maria Taylor notes in her excellent “Global Warming and Climate Change: what Australia knew and buried”

“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…

And here we are.

Categories
United Kingdom

March 18, 2010 – “Solar” by Ian McEwan released.

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…

Categories
United States of America

March 18, 1968 – Bobby Kennedy vs Gross National Product

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.