Categories
Science Scientists United Kingdom

October 8, 1958 – “CO2 has begun to come home, hasn’t it?”

Sixty-six years ago today (October 8th, 1958) British meteorologist Gordon Manley wrote to his friend, steam engineer Guy Callendar, who had – for the past twenty-plus years had been banging on about carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere as a (or even the) factor affecting the climate.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 315ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the International Geophysical Year was happening. More people were coming on board with the carbon dioxide theory, Gilbert Plass, GER Deakin, Appleton, etc. And Manley was congratulating Guy Callendar bless. 

What we learn is that Guy Callendar was getting a little bit of recognition and was getting published still in journals like Tellus and so forth. But he wasn’t being carried through the streets on people’s shoulders, as perhaps he should have been. Such is the nature of humanity when the wrong person making the announcement, if you’re Miss Triggs. 

What we learn is that you can be right and not get the credit you deserve. That’s one of the oldest stories in the book. 

What happened next Callendar had a couple of more really astute observations in him about, for example, why theories aren’t popular, and so forth. And he died in 1964, 37 years to the day after Svante Arrhenius died. 

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

CP 1, Gordon Manley to Callendar, 8 October 1958, cited in Fleming, 2007

Also on this day: 

October 8, 1959 – Shell says “nothing to see here” on carbon dioxide build-up

October 8, 1971 – Lord Kennet pushes back against Nature’s “John Maddox” on the greenhouse effect.

October 8, 1978 – The Times runs an “ice caps melting” story

October 8, 1988 – Aussie poet and activist Judith Wright in final speech, warns of environmental problems ahead…

Categories
Australia

October 7, 2010 – Gillard scraps assembly, goes for “MPCCC”

Fourteen years ago, on this day, October 7th, 2010,

Gillard scraps climate assembly
By Paul Osborne

October 7, 2010 — 5.12pm

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has scrapped her election promise of a citizens’ assembly to deal with climate change, a scheme the opposition described as a dud anyway.

Ms Gillard said other aspects of the party’s election platform – including subsidising the replacement of older cars, rolling out renewable energy projects linked to $1 billion of new transmission lines and improving energy efficiency – would still go ahead.

Ms Gillard on Thursday chaired the first meeting of the multi-party climate change committee – one of the promises made to the Australian Greens and independents to gain support to form minority government.

In a communique released after the meeting, the committee confirmed its intention to “work co-operatively across party lines

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 390ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that Julia Gillard had challenged Kevin Rudd for the leadership at the Labor Party in July, having had enough of his bullshit. There are some quite interesting and plausible accounts of what happened and how it happened. Then she’d gone to an early election. It had been going okay. Mostly, it’s gonna be tight, but Labor looked like they were going to win. Then some leaks started happening from within the cabinet. Funny that. So it was a hung parliament and Gillard had to negotiate with independents like Tony Windsor and Rob Oakshott, and the Greens to form a minority government. And therefore, her idea of a climate assembly – having 150 people to talk about the issue for a year, which she had been persuaded by some Blairite advisor – was now a non-starter, because the Independents wouldn’t wear it. The Independents wanted action. And so therefore, there was the Multi Party Committee on Climate Change, which she invited the Liberals and the Nationals to join (while knowing full well that they wouldn’t).

What we learn is that the climate assembly idea might have worked, if Rudd had come up with it (see Rudd’s “2020” event in 2008). But these processes always get dominated by the loudest, most cashed up and determined. They’re rarely particularly deliberative, especially if the stakes are high. And anyway, by 2010, the timing was all wrong. What could have looked like a sensible circuit breaker now just looked like weakness.

What happened next? How long have you got? MPCCC had its meetings, advised by Ross Garneau, etc. It came up with some legislation. Gillard put that through Parliament. It did an advertising campaign. But by then, Tony Abbott had successfully framed it as “a great big tax on everything” and had also fatally wounded Gillard in public perception. I think Gillard was a successful Prime Minister in terms of the amount of legislation she got through. She was a steady hand on the tiller. But then she also lacks certain things. For example, a penis and children. Therefore, awful, awful woman. 

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.

Also on this day: 

October 7, 1989 – Alexander Downer says mining lobby”weak and gutless”, too soft on greenies

October 7, 2010 – Julia Gillard scraps the “Climate Assembly” idea

Categories
Australia Kyoto Protocol United States of America

October 6, 1997 – Australia says nope to uniform emissions 5% cut. Assholes.

Twenty six years ago, on this day, October 6th, 1997,

Senator Robert Hill, the federal Minister for the Environment, rejected Japan’s proposal of a 5% uniform reduction in emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2012 on the basis that it would result in unacceptable job losses in Australia (ABC television 7.00 pm news 6.10.97)

(Duncan, 1997:10)

Same day President Bill Clinton hosts pre-Kyoto climate conference at the White House… (see New York Times coverage here).

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 364ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that John Howard as prime minister had taken hostility of Australian political elites to the climate treaty from a solid eight through to 11. (“This one goes up to 11.”) And he had sent diplomats around the world over the course of 1997 to try and convince everyone that Australia deserved special treatment at the impending Kyoto meeting, without much success, it has to be said. The Americans were mocking him. Anyway, this above one attempt to break the logjam by the hosts. The Japanese posed an across the board 5% cut from everyone. Now this wouldn’t have been in keeping with the science but it was a bid worth making. The fact that Australia just turned round with a flat rejection tells you plenty.

What we learn is that Australian political elites just don’t give a shit about the future. All they care about is filling their own pockets with loot in the here and now. This is not uncommon, of course.

What happened next? Howard was rewarded for his efforts. Australia managed to get not only 108% so called reductions target, i.e. they got to increase their emissions. But also just through sheer trickery and nastiness they managed to get a land clearing clause backdated to 1990. So that in effect, the emissions reduction target was 130% essentially, de facto if not the jure. 

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.

Also on this day: 

October 6, 1988 – coal lobby says greenhouse effect “greatly exaggerated”

October 6, 1989 – Hawke Government given climate heads up by top scientist

October 6, 2005 – carbon capture is doable…

Categories
Australia

October 5, 1989 – Enviro minister “Richo” warns Hawkie to save “Kakadu”

Thirty five years ago, on this day, October 5th, 1989, Australian Federal Environment Minister Graham Richardson warns Prime Minister Bob Hawke that he will have to save Kakadu (i.e. ban mining) to win the election, because green-minded voters will accept nothing less. (See Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty for details)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that Australia had been digging up and exporting minerals for good 25 years in large quantities. And the whole concept of Aboriginal land rights and sacred sites was nothing important back then. Not to the white people anyway. But by the mid-late 80s, that was changing. And the idea for an expansion of the uranium mine at Kakadu that would damage the National Park was a vote loser in the marginal inner city constituencies where Labor hoped it would be able to cling on to power at the next federal election. This had to happen early in 1990 and therefore Graeme Richardson, who was Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s very effective environment minister, was telling Hawke that he was going to have to save Kakadu even though this was going to seriously piss off the mining lobby. The mining lobby feared that it was the beginning of serious restrictions on their ability to plunder, sorry to “develop”, Australia’s resources for their own benefit. And Hawke took that on board; he delayed the decision and took the credit for that.

What we learn is that these seemingly tangential issues are important to understand if you want to understand how climate policy works

What happened next Labor did in fact squeak home in the March 1990 election, and then had a quid pro quo debt to keep the Ecologically Sustainable Development process. 

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.

Also on this day: 

October 5, 1988 – Vice Presidential Debate and ‘the Greenhouse Effect’

October 5, 1992 – Ignoreland hits the airwaves. #Neoliberalism

October 5, 2006 – Greenpeace sues Blair Government over shonky energy “consultation”

Categories
Carbon Capture and Storage

A Schrodinger’s cat climate technology promised £22bn of UK taxpayer funding.

A mere 17 years after the UK government first said it was indeed going to support Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS),  another bold (but vague) announcement has arrived. This one accompanied with a telephone number vague promise (£22 bn of taxpayer money spread over an alleged 25 years).

The announcement, trailed in the Financial Times yesterday is now accompanied by a Guardian op-ed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. 

Reeves’ article – titled “Today, with our £22bn pledge for carbon capture, Labour’s green revolution for Britain begins “ – reads as if it were drafted by a ChatGPT knock-off trained entirely on industry press releases (“gamechanging technology” “4000 jobs“) and then ‘improved’ with the liberal and random sprinkling of sub-Blairite phonemes (“That’s what drives this government to do things differently. That’s the change we are offering. And that is the change we are determined to deliver.”)

Perhaps the general lesson is the extraordinary power of the fossil fuel lobby, able to get a chancellor who has taken body blows already for having a “treasury brain” and an aversion to any promises of public spending to come out so openly for a huge expenditure with such weak public support.

I literally wrote the book  (“Carbon Capture and Storage in the United Kingdom History, Policies and Politics“) about the history of UK CCS policy. Well, a book – the first book), and I am both unsurprised and underwhelmed by the announcement.

It’s not clear that it is much more than a confirmation of a similar announcement from the Tories, with confirmation that projects everyone knew were “winning” in the third competition for taxpayer support. As the ever-astute FT writers point out

“the three industrial sites receiving support to attach carbon capture technology to their projects fall short of the eight which entered negotiations with the government last year. The prospects of support are now unclear for the remainder.”

Before explaining some of the history and talking about what we can reasonably expect to happen next, I’d like to offer two ways of thinking about CCS.

First, take the famous thought-experiment of the physicist Schrodinger, in which a cat in a box can be thought of as both dead and alive simultaneously.  CCS is, when its proponents want it to be, a mature, proven technology that just needs “policy certainty” (which mostly seems to be code for whopping great Research, Development and Deployment grants and subsidies and generous under-written-by-the-taxpayer ‘market’ mechanisms).  At other times, when research money is being dispensed or decades of delay, under-delivery or downright failure need to be explained away, CCS is a nascent technology, deserving of additional patience and faith. Always dead and alive simultaneously.

Second, if the cat is too cliched, turn your attention to one of the only great Hollywood sequels, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. You will recall it is about a world under the threat of a man-made environmental catastrophe, but for the most part oblivious.  CCS can be thought of as the liquid metal assassin. It’s able to shape shift at will (CCS has been a technology that would save the coal industry, then one that would reduce industrial emissions, then one that would enable the production of so-called ‘blue hydrogen’ and is now even part of sucking random air out of the atmosphere (Direct Air Capture).  Like the liquid metal nemesis, it is also incredibly hard to kill. No matter how many failures it endures, there it is, impassive, gleaming, ready for another bout.

Meanwhile, the timing is exquisite. In a couple of weeks there is, as Reeves’ article notes, Britain’s first international investment summit. It would not be a good look for the CCS decision to still be pending.  Meanwhile the announcement comes a day after a detailed expose of the Australian situation by journalist Royce Kurmelovs, writing for the investigations website Drilled. And even more ironically, a major pilot project in the USA (the latest great hope for CCS advocates) has paused, thanks to uncertainties about another leak. Australian billionaire and green hydrogen fan Twiggy Forrest is also re-entering the fray, with his call for “real zero by 2040” instead of the ‘proven fantasy’ of net zero.

If you know you’re history

The super-short version of this history (and really, there’s a best-selling (1) and award-winning (2) book about this just waiting for your credit card details) is as follows

Man-made climate change first went properly viral in 1953. Oil companies have known about the possible problem of climate change for a long time. A Shell representative wrote an article in the New Scientist minimising it in…. Any takers? … October 1959.

In the early 1970s oil companies started -for entirely different reasons – capturing carbon dioxide and pushing it into oil wells. This was to push extra oil out so it could be sold and burned. This is known as “Enhanced Oil Recovery” and is still a large part of the business model for today’s CCS. The cannier among you may have noticed that doing this  would not actually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being released from below the ground into the atmosphere.  In so many ways CCS is a Shrodinger’s Cat of a “climate mitigation” technology

In the mid-1970s, an Italian physicist, Cesar Marchetti, proposed large scale CCS as a climate solution (with storage being done in the deep oceans). (See my letter in Private Eye).  There was a momentary flurry of interest in CCS in 1989, as politicians responded to scientific and public concerns about “the greenhouse effect”, but they quickly realised it would be incredibly expensive, risky and complicated.  Attention turned to “clean coal.”  In one of life’s little ironies, exactly 31 years ago today (October 4, 1993, the newly-appointed head of the World Coal Institute was reported as saying that the move toward clean coal technologies would be stepped up in the next five years.

With the coming of the Kyoto Protocol it was obvious that eventually some sort of climate technologies (whether actually implemented or not) would be needed by the fossil fuel companies and their supporters. The Blair Government started making appreciative noises, but refused to support a BP proposal in 2005-7. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a competition to support development and deployment of face-saving…. Sorry, coal-saving technology. That competition fizzled out, but not before a junior Tory minister in the Coalition government told Parliament in June 2010 that 

… the coalition Government are committed to carbon capture and storage, which will be a major plank in our efforts to decarbonise our energy supply by 2030; we are committed to the generation of 5 GW of CCS by 2020.

Another competition began. Almost exactly nine years ago (late 2015) Treasurer George Osborne spectacularly and sneakily pulled the rug on a mere 1 billion pound competition (this was back in those innocent pre-pandemic days when 1 billion was real money).

CCS could have died as a policy option in the UK. That it didn’t is down to a relatively small loose network of highly-motivated and skilled individuals who brought it back from the dead. (In my book I call this the Kipling Manoeuvre, for, well, reasons. Did I mention my book is for sale in no good bookshops, but you can order it from good bookshops and bad. Also, online.)

That Kipling process of recreating a consensus around CCS was basically complete by November 2018.  The last 6 years have been a spectacular go-slow, of perseverating, consultationitis, head-scratching, and can-kicking. Even the hosting of a COP didn’t get the UK government to make a decision….

That’s a very UK-centric history (the clue is in the title of The Book).  For an international perspective, there are other books, academic articles, et cetera. And then there is this video.

Burning the uncapturable Midnight Oil

In February 1990, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at about 353ppm,  the Australian band Midnight Oil released a single “Blue Sky Mine”, also the title of the album.

It’s a banger.

It describes a corporate scandal around an asbestos mine. It will shock you to learn that the owners knew the dangers, but the workforce was cheap, disposable, and, well, what do you think happened?

Three lines come to mind

“They pay the truth makers…”

CCS is surrounded by armies of well-paid PR flaks, churning out soothing talking points.  But they’re not the only truth makers. There are other people trusted to create “value-neutral” knowledge who may not always be quite so value-neutral as they want (everyone) to believe. There’s a rather interesting letter in today’s Financial Times…

The other lines – I will let you fill in the blanks – are

“And the company takes what the company wants.”

“And nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground”

What next? Expect “me too” and resistance. Accidents will happen

Four final predictions.

First, Scottish advocates of CCS will be unsurprised but fuming;  always the bridesmaid… They might sing another Australian song “What About Me? “What about me? It isn’t fair. I don’t have enough, now I want my share”) and continues  “And now I’m standing on the corner, All the world’s gone home Nobody’s changed, nobody’s been saved” I predict that the Scots will be singing it, lustily, via glossy reports, scientific papers and everything in between.

Second, the “anti-CCS” forces will grow, coalesce. Until now they have been relatively muted in the UK since a brief flurry in the late 2000s, when they killed off the idea of building new “capture-ready” coal-fired power plants..

Already there’s been an open letter signed by scientists trying to get the UK government to hit the pause button.

Local groups are stirring into action. See for eample

Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust’s stance on the proposed Solent CO2 carbon capture pipeline project

Expect more of these sorts of statements and campaigns (I will add to the list below) and, of course, expect counter-attacks from CCS’s powerful advocates (“uninformed,” “NIMBY,” “Luddite,” “anti-progress,” “hypocritical” etc)

Three, there will be further delays and reversals, over policy, funding, deployment. Don’t count out battles over the path of carbon dioxide pipelines, or the other transport infrastructure.

Don’t be surprised if the “permanent” storage isn’t quite as certain as the blithe assurances would have you believe.

Finally. In 1990 the atmospheric blanket of heat-trapping carbon dioxide was 354 ppm.  This year it hit a new record of 426.  It is absolutely certain next year will be higher.  All the CCS in the world, all the “Direct Air Capture” in the world (don’t even start me on that) will not change that, ever. CCS would at best slow down the acceleration of the thickening of the blanket, at great cost.  

We have no idea what we are into, and we have no idea which consequences are going to come how fast in which order.  Buckle up.

Footnotes

  1. Actual facts may vary
  2. Actual facts may vary

Categories
Science

October 4, 1957 – see, see – SPUTNIK!!

Sixty seven years ago, on this day, October 4th, 1957,

1957 – Space Race: Launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. Science budget up etc

Science Budget through the roof

Onion Our Dumb Century

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that at the end of World War Two, there had been an unseemly scramble between the Soviets and the Americans as to who could hoover up more and better German rocket scientists. And the Americans probably thought they were on their way; the Nazis had their reputations cleansed as part of Operation Paperclip. The Soviets didn’t have to bother with PR quite so much – one advantage of the Stalinist dictatorship. And then on the fourth of October, everyone got to take them by surprise, because a small metal ball was launched into space Beep, beep beep. 

What we learn what/why this matters, The broader context was that the International Geophysical Year was happening. The Americans had kind of assumed that they were going to get the first satellite into space and start taking measurements of stuff. Their self-image was badly dented. They started throwing serious money at science education and the President’s Scientific Advisory Council was created and that had important implications. It was an important venue for Roger Revelle in 1964, when he was writing about environmental pollution.

What happened next, the Americans continued freaking out about control of space. And also weather modification is a major part of the story in money getting allocated to research that, ironically, would show that weather modification, deliberate weather modification, was not so easy. And inadvertent weather modification was happening all along. But then they’d already been told that by Gilbert Plass in 1953, and had decided not to listen to him, I guess…

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.

Also on this day: 

October 4, 1969 – “If we melt the Antarctic, our problems are solved because all of the ports of the world would vanish and the ocean will rise 200 feet.”

October 4, 1978 – the Interdepartmental group on Climatology meets for the first time…

Categories
Coal Fossil fuels Industry Associations technosalvationism United Kingdom

October 4, 1993 – Coal chief wringing his hands about “greenhouse,” promises new tech

Thirty one years ago, on this day, October 4th, 1993,

London, Sunday It was difficult to see how global carbon dioxide emissions could be stabilised by 2000 unless governments implemented politically unacceptable decisions, the new chief executive of the World Coal Institute said last week.

But Dr Alex Toohey, a former director of Shell Coal International who took over as head of the WCI on Friday, said the move toward clean coal technologies would be stepped up in the next five years.

Noack, K. 1993. Emission Cuts A Hard Choice, Says Coal Chief. The Age, 4 October.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 357ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the fossil fuel lobbyists had managed to defeat a strong deal at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992. But the issue clearly wasn’t going to go away because already a bunch of nations had ratified the treaty. And it was clear there was going to be a series of meetings about what to do. The coal industry was still largely helpless because none of the technological options was convincing to them, let alone to anyone else. And so, we see here some hand wringing and some indication of technology as a magic fix. Sprinkle the word “innovation”, bish bosh and you’re done.

What we learn is that the fossil fuel industry was helpless, and naked. The reason it’s fighting so hard now with CCS is because it doesn’t have anything else. 

What happened next? The World Coal Institute changed its name more than once. But you can’t really put that much lipstick on a pig and the emissions kept climbing

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.

Also on this day: 

October 4, 1969 – “If we melt the Antarctic, our problems are solved because all of the ports of the world would vanish and the ocean will rise 200 feet.”

October 4, 1978 – the Interdepartmental group on Climatology meets for the first time…

Categories
Activism Unsolicited advice

How do we honour the soup-throwers?

“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.”

Anon

How do we honour the Just Stop Oil soup throwers?

That’s it. That’s the blog.

This is mostly bullet points, scattered “rhetoric” (doggerel)  and my usual “robustness” (1), because, for reasons (2) I am continuing to not deliver (but still gestate) that promised poetic palaver about what the JSO action “means”.  You can see my 11 theses (sank without trace  more on that below) here.

How do we honour the Just Stop Oil soup throwers?

We will come back to the How. Let’s skip for now to we. Who is “we”?  Probably you. It’s people who “get” climate change (not as many as there should be, 35 years into the public phase of the crisis).  Even if you think the soup throwers were worse than useless (and I sympathise with that view!), please read on, because by honour I do not mean celebrate.

Principally I am aiming these challenges (3) at people who want to see a better (i.e. less “being killed at ever-higher velocity and ferocity”) world.

“We” is those who try to take action, spread the word about the overlapping crises, including climate, and who think that the soup-throwers are at worst misguided or at best brave, clear Examples To Us All. If you are on that spectrum, then great (4). 

Honour?  

I do not mean celebrate.

I do. NOT. mean. Celebrate. 

I do not mean “turn into plaster saints and martyrs.”  (though that might be part of how we support them).  

I mean, how do we take what they did seriously?  Not the action, necessarily, but the willingness to face consequences.

And what do I mean by “soup-throwers”?

Synecdoche. There’s these non-violent symbolic actions (NVSA) and then there’s also the NVDA undertaken by people blocking oil refineries etc. And getting into arms factories.  And let’s remember that in many many parts of the world environmental activists are lucky if they end up in jail.  A more permanent punishment (bullet in the neck, body in a ditch, or … disappeared) is common and getting commoner.

So.  Pause a second.  You’ve read this far.  Have you asked yourself that question before now?   If yes, think on your answer. Happy? If not, go on. Jot something else down.

Never thought about it before? Jot something down.

I do not care about my answers (some are below, and more will follow but sfw).  You should not care about my answers (sfw, right?). 

Please care about YOUR answers. And about how you arrive at them. In discussion with who? And what you then DO about those answers.  If you take anything from the rest of this rant (and it is a rant), that is it. 

YOUR answers to that question – answers you do not have to arrive at on your own, alone in a box right now – are what matters. Well, to be precise, the actions you take after you come to provisional answers  are what matters.

If you think you have no answers and will never have any and therefore can stop reading. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GAIA I IMPLORE YOU TO RESIST THAT UNDERSTANDABLE IMPULSE, THAT REACHING FOR THE COMFORT OF OBLIVION.  

Because

  1. You DO have answers. You are just scared of them and their implications
  2. Even before you have answers that satisfy you (and they may never satisfy you. Mine never have and I am an old fucker), you can help other people find their answers.  That, already, is a contribution.

Still here? Well, okay, so I lied. There are four questions.  I lie a lot about this sort of stuff. Bait and switch..  It doesn’t matter

How do we “honour the soup-throwers”?

  1. As individuals? Here, now, next week.
  2. As individuals in groups trying to slow down the acceleration of the destruction of the planet and all its beauty?
  3. As individuals in places of work, worship, leisure, “etc”, with minimal power as individuals?
  4. How do we help OTHER people honour the soup-throwers? How do we build platforms, venues and “norms” so that these questions – can be discussed more broadly, and then acted on?

I am going to set out in the rest of this rant (and it is  still a rant) what MY answer the first question is, sorta. And have a light pass at the fourth, and beg your help.

I am going to make a commitment (it won’t last, but then again, maybe it will).  That’s gonna be called MAB – Marc’s Andon Board. No, don’t click on the link. It’s repeated below.

I am going to ask you to begin to answer these four questions, and to encourage other people to answer those questions.  Especially any prominent people you know, people who spend their time telling everyone about how fucked the world is and how awful the State-Corporate response to climate change has been, is being, but who rarely if ever ponder our 35 years of failure to force the State-Corporate beast to behave itself.

How do we honour the soup throwers as individuals?

The standard answer is let’s “Redouble our efforts”  As per Boxer in Animal Farm, whenever confronted with failure, his answer was always  – “I will work harder.

Yes, but if we’re doing the wrong things (and sometimes we are), doing them twice as much and twice as fast isn’t the win you think it is.

The promise feels good (until you don’t keep it, but hey, nobody’s holding your feet to the fire), but the reality after, not so much?

If we really want to honour the soup-throwers, we have to think hard about failure. Which is hard.

To quote Hudson’s  7th thesis on Futility

  1. The failure is that of parties, politicians, churches, unions, industry associations, social movements, academics (ESPECIALLY academics. Court jesters without the lulz).  Failure to be honest, brave, persistent, clear-sighted. Failure to resist co-optation, repression. So much pain, shame.

Because until we admit that the soup-throwing is a sign of desperation, a sign of the lack of a huge mass movement that refuses to be cowed, bought off, confused, then we are stuck. 

And all the way back in 2018, that was the promise, wasn’t it? Fill the jails, force the government to declare a climate emergency, force the creation of citizen assemblies that would short-circuit the power of the vested interests/institutional inertia.  The Truth, told, would set us free. Yeah, nah.

But it’s too easy to blame the 2018 “crop” of activists. This isn’t about “blame” (morality tales and other ourobososes).  This is about systems (more on that another post) and about courage.

Courage on its own is not enough 

The soup throwers, especially the post-sentencing-of-the-first-batch-batch have enormous courage. Nobody can dispute it.

But courage is not enough.

The sound of a splat of soup versus thick glass, is the same sound as the noise of tactics without strategy. Thatt’s the noise before defeat.  Well, alongside defeat

But while we are on courage, this.  The soupthrowers have it.  They are willing to face severe consequences: physical, financial, mental. Deprivation of liberty for prolonged periods.


Surely “we” should honour THEIR courage by matching it with some of the other forms of courage out there that don’t get talked about.  Courage to face our pasts. Courage to face confronting emotions. Courage to face beliefs we have about ourselves, our tribes and our societies that maybe were never true, or maybe are no longer true: cognitive courage.

So, how do we honour them?
We honour them by being brave enough to have courage.

And courageous enough to be honest enough to know that our courage, on our own, is dreadfully and pitifully finite.  

We honour them by accepting, both emotionally and intellectually, that without networks of support – networks of friends, families, neighbours, members of congregations, groups, friends we’ve had on the Internet for years whose voices we may never  even have heard – we will fail. The courage will be boiled away by the firestorms of daily horror.

Without networks that we build, extend, nurture, we will be left in not just the same state we were before we decided to try to honour the soupthrowers, but WORSE, because we will have known what we needed to do, what we promised ourselves to do, and yet failed to do it.

So.  Here is the unsolicited advice (come on, you always knew it was going to come).

Have a conversation with two or three different people about what honouring the soup throwers looks like FOR YOU.  Is it to engage in local activism? To re-engage? To learn a new skill? To challenge, with courage and commitment, something that is not going well in a campaigning group you are in.  Or something else.

  • Start with your dilemma, your goal,  and how you really want their help, their en-courage-ment.  
  • If you can be concrete, specific, then maybe that. If not, trust they will listen (but be ready, of course, if they don’t)
  • Be open to their nos, to their doubts. 
  • Start where you are, with something small. A commitment that you will do x or y or z, and that to do that you need their support (mentorship, advice, feedback. Whatever).

And here’s the second plea.  We have to be public about this.  We have to try to start a conversation about “how do we honour the soupthrowers?”

It’s a lousy title, because it centres a divisive (and frankly not very clever) tactic. Soupthrowing gets people’s backs up.  I’ve been using it so far as a place-holder. If I were making a Hashtag of it all I wouldn’t seriously consider any o fthese

#BlessedAreTheSoupThrowers [As per Life of Brian “It refers to any manufacturer of vegan products” ]

#SupportYourLocalSoupThrower  (James Garner vibe)

#SoupThrowersOfTheWorldUnite

Canning the whole “soup-thrower” thing I tried this

#ItsNotTooLateToDieMoreClassily

#LetsFaceExtinctionWithHonour

#BetterClimateAction

#DownWithTheSmugosphere

Perhaps we just need

#CollectiveCourage 

Any other suggestions?

Here’s my plea, in specifics.

Please try to get OTHER people, especially high profile people doing this. Here’s a draft letter. Modify as you see fit.

Dear X,
I like and respect your work. I’ve read your books/Twitter threads. I’ve watched your documentaries/TikToks. 

I know you know we’re in deep shit.

I am writing to bring to your attention a proposal from Marc Hudson, a UK-based activist of dubious morals and pleasantness. 

He is trying to get a conversation going about “how do we  really honour and support the soup throwers” [the activists who threw the soup at the Van Gogh sunflowers painitng (and in fact all people struggling for freedom, dignity, sanity and survival everywhere, often under conditions far far more dangerous [deadly] than them.]

He doesn’t mean a solidarity campaign for the release of those people (though of course that’s part of the support.

He is trying to get people answering four questions.  I think the questions are okay, and I am posting them here.  Then again maybe you have other questions).

How do we “honour the soup-throwers”?

1, As individuals? Here, now, next week.

2, As individuals in groups trying to slow down the acceleration of the destruction of the planet and all its beauty?

3, As individuals in places of work, worship, leisure, “etc”, with minimal power as individuals?

4, How do we help OTHER people honour the soup-throwers? How do we build platforms, venues and “norms” so that these questions – can be discussed more broadly, and then acted on?

He’s suggesting the hashtag #CollectiveCourage

I am going to have a go at having conversations with people whose opinion I trust. But I only have a very small platform. It would be great if YOU would try to get wider conversations going.

Yours in parasocial bliss,

[insert name here]

Send this to folks? See if anyone does anything.

Okay, so I know all this is  hubristic (not for the first time). I know it won’t “work.”  But to allow that knowledge to paralyse me is to dishonour people who are facing (or indeed doing) serious time. Not to mention those corpses in the ditches and those bodies under the bombs.

Finally

What happens if we don’t do this?

We continue to fail.  James Baldwin said “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  Well, if we don’t face past failure, and the likelihood that any courage we try to muster will vanish instantly, we will continue to fail.

We are probably going to fail anyway. It is probably too late to salvage anything from the ruins.  We’ve been warned for over 50 years about trouble ahead at a planetary level. Some of us believed, acted, but not enough of us, not enough, not with enough power.  And here we are.

Why won’t we do this?

Because it’s scary. It involves us getting out of our normal roles, and talking about things we don’t feel qualified to talk about.  It’s safe to stay talking about the science we were trained in, or the policy systems we know intimately. 

Other people will tell us they are unhappy, threatened. They will tell us we are risking ridicule, harming our reputations.

We will worry that we have nothing to say. We will wonder if it’s because we are somehow “not smart enough”, rather merely not brave enough. And for those of us who pride ourselves on our “intelligence”, that is soul-threatening. 

It involves us failing at things that really matter.

How won’t we do this?

This is easy .Three ways

  1.  Ignore the call – click through, bookmark, but never come back.
  1. Smear the call(er).  “What a fuckwit. What a narcissist, telling people what they should be discussing, just to cope with his irrelevance, his unwillingness to do high-risk activism. Loser.”

“What a waste of time. He wants a pity party, he wants to see us all tearing each other down. It’s probably some sort of psyop from 77th Brigade.”

3,  Do it half-assed (for reasons; a)  we don’t really believe in it  but feel obliged to pretend we do to look brave/responsible. . b) We believe in it but are threatened by it and are going to allow our fears and uncertainties to run the show

How will we WILL do it

This is what I will do.

I will put up my Andon Board post tonight. See here.
Once I put an Andon Board up itself,  I will write more over the coming days about these other questions.

I will send this post and a personal cover letter to people I know, people I respect, people I haven’t spoken to for years, people I fell out with, people I didn’t.

Ultimately, personal example doesn’t actually get anything very far.  George Monbiot tried to get public figures to talk honestly about their money and where it came from. People applauded him and did not follow his lead.

If we are going to honour the soupthrowers courage – have courage, build courage, replenish courage, it will be  a collective endevaour. 

(as per collective hope (see my long response to the essay by Tim Winton)

Collective does not mean national or nationalised, top-down or Leninist. It can’t work like that. It means granular, local, hybrid, support.

It won’t happen. I am not a child.


It must happen.

Over to you.

Footnotes

  1. A bit of bracing bluntness, parrhesia. It’s easier like that.
  2. Medical, mostly. Resolving? Thank god for the NHS and for all people doing their best within it.
  3. barbs, snarks, snarbs, barks and bites and bile
  4. come be on my spectrum
Categories
Kyoto Protocol Media

October 3, 1997 – CNN pretends to grow a spine (Spoiler, stays jellyfish)

Twenty-seven years ago, on this day, October 3rd, 1997, the American cable news network CNN tells an “anti-Kyoto” coalition it won’t run their ads,

Of course, it later recants.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 364ppm. As of 2024 it is 4xxppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that CNN had been owned until the year before by Ted Turner, who fancied himself as the Ecowarrior. And it had been taking money from fossil fuel lobbyists, like the Global Climate Coalition, which was trying to weaken public support for the Kyoto Protocol.

What we learn is that corporations, or individuals within corporations may think that they have spines, but if they get between a source of profit, and the owners of the company, then other members of the corporation, whether it’s publicly or privately owned, will have something else to say. And this was very beautifully put in Julian Rathbone’s eco thriller, The Euro killers, in the late 70s. And if we all read a bit more eco-thriller fiction, we would be less surprised by life, perhaps.

What happened next, CNN did a u-turn. The Global Climate Coalition kept pressing and succeeded. And then in 2002, decided to shut up shop because big members were defecting. And anyway, their work was done. And since then, we’ve had other outfits performing elements of the same function. So the Cooler Heads Coalition set up in 2007, which is mostly now sort of information sharing and spine stiffening for members of Congress and so forth. 

See also – FRAMING OF G8 stuff in early 2001 in Italy – March 7, 2001 – CNN unintentionally reveals deep societal norms around democracy https://allouryesterdays.info/2023/03/06/march-7-2001-cnn-unintentionally-reveals-deep-societal-norms-around-democracy/

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.

Also on this day: 

October 3, 1975 – Three members of Congress introduce first bill for a national #climate program.

October 3, 2004 – John Howard revealed to have asked for fossil fuel CEOs to kill renewables. #auspol

Categories
United Kingdom United States of America

October 3, 1970 & 2008: Nixon creates EPA, Brown creates DECC

Fifty four/Sixteen years ago, on this day, October 3rd, 1970/2008,

In 1970, Nixon created the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), another major center of atmospheric monitoring, forecasting and general circulation modeling.

(Howe, 2014:51)

AND

DECC was formed on 3 October 2008 to focus specifically upon the twin challenges of climate change and energy supply. DECC brings together certain groups from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Energy Group for DBERR (including the team that is coordinating the CCS demonstration competition).

(Bowman and Addison, 2008: 522) 

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm (1970) and 386ppm (2008). As of 2024 it is 4xxppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that in 1970 President Nixon signed off on the Environmental Protection Agency. It was created having been an idea that had been around for a while. And in 2008. In the UK, in a departmental combination reshuffle, the Department of Energy and Climate Change was created under Ed Miliband. In the gap, 38, long, long years of wasted time, where we made things significantly worse. 

What we learn is that new agencies and departments of state come into existence. They produce glossy reports. They are a sandpit for middle-class people to play in. Sometimes useful stuff gets done, especially if there is enough external pressure that the people in charge are forced to adopt some of the good ideas that have been ignored/suppressed.. Probably marginally better that they exist than they don’t, I suppose. But if you really want to see meaningful action, it will require an alert vigorous civil society, and that is a different kettle of fish.

What happened next Well the Environmental Protection Agency is still going and sometimes it does useful stuff, it depends on who’s been appointed boss. So under Reagan they had the wrecking ball woman, whatever her name was – Anne Gorsuch and then under Bush two they declared that CO2 was not their business, it wasn’t a pollutant. Massachusetts took the EPA to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said actually it IS your business, that was in 2007.

DECC did what it could but under the Coalition it was largely irrelevant. Well that’s a bit unfair: they put together some work on industrial decarbonisation for example. And it kept fighting. DECC was abolished in 2016 and became part of BEIS which also did some good work, ish.

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

Xxx

Also on this day: 

October 3, 1975 – Three members of Congress introduce first bill for a national #climate program.

October 3, 2004 – John Howard revealed to have asked for fossil fuel CEOs to kill renewables. #auspol