Categories
Cultural responses United States of America

April 19, 1973 – first film to mention global warming released (Soylent Green)

Fifty years ago, on this day, April 19, 1973, the first Hollywood film to mention global warming was released…

1973 Soylent Green released http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 331.5ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

Harry “Stainless Steel Rat” Harrison had written a novel called “Make Room, Make Room”, published in 1968. This became Soylent Green.

The timing wasn’t as good as it could have been – the “Malthusian Moment” was passing/had passed, but such is the danger with films, which inevitably have a long lead-time.

See also other films of the time that have interesting things to say about “ecology”-

Silent Running (1972)

Rollerball (1975)

The Omega Man (1971) (starring C. Heston)

Planet of the Apes  (1968) (starring C. Heston)

What I think we can learn from this

Global warming was considered by the script-writers and director to be well-enough known as not to mystify the audience…

It’s hard to talk about societal conspiracies/conspiracies of silence. This film was a decent effort, imo.

And the stuff with Edward G. Robinson is great…

What happened next

Heston, who had been a liberal darling, went further and further “right” – a common but not universal or inevitable path.

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.

See also

https://www.c-span.org/video/?425972-1/1973-film-soylent-green-environmental-movement

Categories
Australia

April 18, 2013, Liberal Party bullshit about “soil carbon” revealed to be bullshit

Ten years ago, on this day, April 18, 2013, Liberal Party bullshit about “soil carbon” was revealed to be nonsense.

18 April 2013:[ABC investigative television programme]  Lateline follows up with CSIRO on soil carbon and proves again that Greg Hunt’s soil carbon plan would require up to “two thirds of the land mass of Australia.”   

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The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 398.6ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

The Liberal and National Party opposition had been hammering the Gillard government on the so-called “carbon tax” and proposing a so-called “direct action” scheme, despite pleadings from business.  “Direct Action” (nice name, shame about the science) was based on heroic (i.e. bullshit) assumptions about lots of things, including the ability of soil to absorb carbon….  So, Greg Hunt, Liberal opposition spokesman on climate (who had written an Honours thesis on carbon trading in 1990) was out there spouting all sorts of nonsense.  And getting pushback, but so what, eh?

What I think we can learn from this

Facts don’t matter, when there is a vast propaganda machine defending anyone spewing useful non-facts.

What happened next

On 19 April 2013: Climate Spectator points out mysteries, questions and problems after Greg Hunt’s address to ANU. The [Labor] Government also releases a detailed line by line rebuttal of Greg Hunt’s speech.

The Liberal National coalition became the government. “Direct Action” was “tried” – and guess what, to precisely nobody’s surprise, emissions went up.

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.

Categories
Australia Carbon Pricing

April 17, 1993 –  Paul Keating versus the idea of a carbon tax…

Thirty years ago, on this day, April 17, 1993, newly-re-elected Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating made another mental note to hate environmentalists….

The Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy, Simon Crean, have denied knowledge of alleged Treasury proposals for a $1.9 billion energy tax.

Mr Crean rejected reports in The Weekend Australian and The Age on Saturday [17 April] which suggested that a tax on the energy content or fuels and possibly carbon emissions, being discussed by Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, had drawn on studies by the Department of Primary Industries and Energy

Brough, J. 1993. Keating, Crean deny energy-tax proposal. Canberra Times, Monday 19 April, p.3. http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/126983159

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359.4ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

The carbon tax idea had been around for quite a while, and in 1990-91 a combination of industry figures managed to defeat it.  Environment Minister Ros Kelly had said, at the Rio Earth Summit, that it wasn’t something that would be done, but the proposed “solution” did not, of course, go away. If Australia were to meet its “stabilisation target”, let alone its 20 per cent reduction by 2005 target, economic measures like a tax were going to be needed…

What I think we can learn from this

People inside bureaucracies leak, either to put pressure on politicians, or to kill an idea by prematurely releasing it. In this case, who knows?

What happened next

The push for a carbon tax came up again, in 1994, and was defeated by early 1995. There wouldn’t be a price on carbon dioxide until 2012, and that only lasted a couple of years. And the emissions climbed….

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

Categories
Australia Carbon Capture and Storage Coal

April 16, 2008 – Aussie trades unions, greenies, companies tried to get CCS ‘moving.’

Fifteen years ago, on this day, April 16, 2008, trades unions and greenies and companies tried to get CCS ‘moving.’

“In April 2008 the Australian Coal Association (ACA) proposed — in conjunction with WWF Australia, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and the Climate Institute in Australia — that the Rudd Labor government establish a National Carbon Capture and Storage Taskforce. The taskforce, they proposed, “would be charged with developing and implementing a nationally coordinated plan to oversee rapid demonstration and commercialisation of 10,000 GWh of carbon capture and storage (CCS) electricity per year by 2020.”

https://www.gem.wiki/The_Australian_Coal_Association%27s_Proposed_Carbon_Capture_and_Storage_Taskforce

Here’s a picture of the top of the press release

And here’s a link to a pdf – https://www.sourcewatch.org/images/b/b4/ACA_Media_Release_160408.pdf

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 387.3ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

While trying to become Australian Prime Minister, the Labor Party’s Kevin Rudd had used climate change as an issue with which to paint incumbent Prime Minister John Howard as an uncaring dinosaur. Rudd had also used “carbon capture and storage” as a way of calming the nerves of coalminers in vital states (Queensland and New South Wales).  Now a coalition of pro-coal types and “greenies” were trying to get some money.  And money they would get…

What I think we can learn from this

Wanna win elections? Make big promises. Whether they can be kept or not will depend…

Technological salvationism fantasies need institutional and organisational backing.  Lots of it.  Players know this, and get the taxpayer to fund it.

What happened next

Rudd threw 100 million Australian taxpayers’ dollars at the creation of a “Global Carbon Capture and Storage institute”.

Those projects all up and running by 2020, then twelve years in the future? Yeah, nah.

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.

Categories
Australia

April 16, 1980 – Melbourne Age reports “world ecology endangered”

Forty three years ago, on this day, April 16, 1980, the Melbourne Age ran an article based on comments by US scientist William Kellogg and others at a US Senate energy and natural resources committee hearing the day before. 

“The world could face an ecological disaster unless the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere is controlled.”

It is a stone cold classic of the “we were warned earlier than you think” genre. It is based on a congressional hearing, led by a clued-up Democrat, Paul Tsongas. Many familiar names are there (including some less familiar ones).  And the warnings are entirely prescient.

And here we are.

Anon. 1980. World Ecology is endangered. The Age, April 16, p.9.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 340.9ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

The big scientific push from the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, had left the scientists pretty clear on what was coming down the line. Their big challenge was to get politicians to see it.  Some (Tsongas, George Brown et al.) did…

What I think we can learn from this

The same dynamic has been playing out for ages – library shelves grown under the weight of books about the Science-Politics “interface”, with bromides about what is to be done…

What happened next

Work was already underway in Australia for an Australian Academy of Science conference about the topic.  Graeme Pearman and others (Barrie Pittock) were beavering away.

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.

Categories
United Nations United States of America

April 15, 1974 – war criminal Henry Kissinger gives climate danger speech

Forty nine years ago, on this day, April 15, 1974, war criminal, sorry “Secretary of State” Henry Kissinger gave a speech at the United Nations General Assembly. It used a security frame around climate change (which at that stage was not ascribed just (or even at all) to carbon dioxide build-up – plain old dust was also seen as a culprit).

 Kissinger Speech at 1974, the sixth special session of the General Assembly (which called on WMO to undertake a study of climate change). “The poorest nations, already beset by man-made disasters, have been threatened by a natural one: the possibility of climatic changes in the monsoon belt and perhaps throughout the world.”

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 332.6ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

The US had been trying to use environmental concerns as a way of distracting from or re-dressing (but not redressing) concerns about its military activities (a euphemism for napalming babies).  So, Nixon had tried to get NATO to look at environmental problems – see Hamblin’s book “Arming Mother Nature.”.

And here we still were, with Nixon mired in the Watergate scandal that would force his resignation within months, with Kissinger trying a different angle.

What I think we can learn from this

“Climate change” was, is and will be a political football. That does not mean it is not real and very deadly.

What happened next

One amusing outcome was that Kissinger’s speech was used as ammunition by Nugget Coombs, Australian civil servant (retired by this stage) to get the Whitlam Government to request the Australian Academy of Science to look into the issue.  The AAS did this – holding a conference of experts, including Hermann Flohn.

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.

Categories
United States of America

April 15, 1965 – Murray Bookchin warns about carbon dioxide build-up

Forty nine years ago, on this day, April 15, 1965, Murray Bookchin’s second book “Crisis in Our Cities” becomes one of the first to contain a warning about the long-term build up of carbon dioxide.

On page 187 we have this – 

And this –  “Meteorologists believe that the immediate effect of increased heat leads to violent air circulation and increasingly destructive storms….  theoretically, after several centuries of fossil-fuel combustion, the increased heat of the atmosphere could even melt the polar ice caps of the earth and lead to the inundation of the continents with sea water.”

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 322.1ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.  

The context was

Herber (real name Murray Bookchin) had written about “Our Synthetic Environment in 1962, ahead of the publication of Rachel Carson’s far more influential “Silent Spring.”

This, his second book, mentioned the danger of climate change.  I will try to dig into it more, but I strongly suspect Bookchin will have read the Conservation Foundation’s report on its March 1963 meeting about the C02 problem, held in New York.

The timing was good too – just two months earlier, in his special address to Congress, President Lyndon Johnson had name-checked carbon dioxide build-up.

What I think we can learn from this

Educated people have known for yonks.
Bookchin had to operate under a pseudonym because he was (checks notes) … an anarchist…

What happened next

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.

Categories
United States of America

April 14, 1964 – RIP Rachel Carson

Fifty nine years ago, on this day, April 14, 1964,  Rachel Carson died. Her second book, based on three long articles in The New Yorker, was Silent Spring. It is surely one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 321.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. ,

The context was

Carson had written a previous book, on the oceans, in which she mentioned that the Arctic climate was warming. However,  her work on “Silent Spring” serialised in three long articles in The New Yorker was a publishing sensation, coming just as a series of anxieties about the consequences – social and environmental – around the 1950s boom were coming to a head.

By this time, Carson was already seriously unwell with the cancer that was to kill her.  She was, of course, ferociously attacked by the chemicals industry and its allies. This is what happens…

What I think we can learn from this

Vale Rachel Carson!!

Her enemies were instructive.

Other doom-critics were less guarded in their attacks. Few were more indignant than Thomas R. Shepard, Jr., the publisher of Look magazine. In his remarkable 1973 book The Doomsday Lobby, coauthored with Melvin Grayson, he clearly allowed outrage to divert him from the path of reason. Particular invective was reserved for Silent Spring. The book was, the two men argued, an attack on the business establishment, an attack on scientific and technological progress, an attack on the United States, and an attack on man himself.  Millions of Americans had bought the book “as avidly as the buxom hausfraus of Bavaria had bought the garbage of Adolf Hitler, and for much the same reason.”

(McCormick, 1991:85) Reclaiming Paradise

See also Lewis Herber (aka Murray Bookchin), who wrote a book called “Our Synthetic Environment” covering the same territory. See here for more info – https://blog.oup.com/2015/08/murray-bookchin-climate-change/

And see tomorrow’s post for Herber/Bookchin’s next book, in 1965…

What happened next

DDT came under the microscope, and went from more-or-less wonder chemical to pariah in 8 years…

The global environment movement took off in 1968/9.

Also on this day

 April 14, 1980 – Carter’s scientist, Frank Press, pushes back against CEQ report – All Our Yesterdays

April 14th, 1989 – 24 US senators call for immediate unilateral climate action

April 14, 2014 – MCA launches “Australians for Coal”
April 14, 2018 – David Buckel’s climate-inspired suicide

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.

Categories
United States of America

April 13, 1968 – the New Yorker glosses air pollution, mentions carbon dioxide

Fifty five years ago, on this day, April 13, 1968, the New Yorker ran an article about air pollution

“One example of the state of the debate is an article on air pollution in the New Yorker in 1968. It devoted one paragraph to global climate change, which concluded: “The average person, however, is not worrying about melting ice caps when he looks up at the murky sky but is simply wondering what the air is doing to him.” Iglauer, Edith, “The Ambient Air,” New Yorker, April 13, 1968, pp. 51-70, quote from p. 51.”.  

(Hart, 1992, p30, footnote 66)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

People were just beginning to move from local pollution (air, water etc) issues to global/systemic ones, from individual incidents (Torrey Canyon etc) to one of ‘everything is at risk’. This pivot was really 1968/1969…

What I think we can learn from this

We knew?  Or rather, from the late 1960s, you had to expend more effort in not knowing…

What happened next

From 1969 to 1972, “the environment” was all around us (see what I did there?).  Then it went away as an issue but not as a problem.  This is what happens. Mankind can only bear a little truth…

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

Hart, D. (1992) Strategies of Research Policy Advocacy: Anthropogenic Climatic Change Research, 1957-1974.  Belfer Centre, https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/disc_paper_92_08.pdf

Categories
Australia Business Responses Economics of mitigation

April 12, 1993 – “environmental economics” gets a puff piece

Thirty years ago, on this day, April 12, 1993, “environmental economics” returned as one of those “win-win” myths we like to believe, in the pages of the Canberra Times.

Environmental issues hardly rated a mention during the recent election campaign. This should not be taken to suggest there is no interest in such issues, just that economics appears to have been the dominant issue of the day.

Nor should it be taken as suggesting that economics and the environment are separate and distinct issues; they are not. The interaction of economics and the environment is taking on increasing importance, with one indicator being the rethinking that is going on about the way environmental regulations are being administered, including greater thought being given to the use of market-based approaches to environmental regulation.

One of the most prominent of the market-based approaches involves the use of tradeable emission permits, in effect using market mechanisms to encourage business to reduce its pollution output.

Davis, B. 1993. Enviro-economics gathers respectability. Canberra Times, 12 April, p.11.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359.4ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

The green ‘surge’ of 1988 to 1991 or so was a distant memory. But people like Brent Davis, director of trade and policy research with the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, were still thinking about how the circle could be squared.

“Ecological modernisation” was not yet an academic buzzword, but it was coming….

What I think we can learn from this

We have various fairy stories of how  “we” can keep having everything we want without consequences (a form of cakeism).  These are very seductive and contagious stories

What happened next

A second attempt at a carbon tax was defeated in early 1995. Thereafter attention switched to tradeable emissions quotas and emissions trading schemes etc etc.  Which really achieved a lot, oh yes.

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.