Tag: 1972

Categories
Canada International processes

October 30, 1972 – Carroll Wilson writes to Maurice Strong, pondering networks

Fifty two years ago, on this day, October 30th, 1972 the Canadian oil baron who had sorted out the United Nations environment conference receives a letter (I know, “hold the front page” right?)

 In a letter to Maurice Strong, the chairman of the Stockholm conference, Carroll Wilson wondered “how and in what ways one might develop a kind of network of the rather limited number of key influential people in a certain number of countries around the world who are globally conscious and who have a vision extending to the end of this century and beyond and who have a deep concern for the environment in its broadest sense.” Wilson to Strong, October 30, 1972, Wilson papers, M.I.T. Archives, Box 44, File 1818.

 (Hart, David, 1992 Belfer thing)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the Stockholm conference had happened. And the United Nations Environment Program had been created. There was a broader question of how to maintain or even increase momentum. What sorts of networks and communities might you need? Caroll Wilson, who’d been neck deep in organising the first study of man’s environmental impact in 1970 was clearly pondering the issues. And who better to talk with that Maurice Strong who had shepherded the Stockholm conference. 

What we learn is that in the aftermath of conferences there is talk about, “well, how do we sustain the momentum.” And here we are. And of course, if you try and have those conversations before, people are resistant because they just want their big moment of orgasm. And they don’t want to have to think about what comes next because they kind of on some level know that it will be a bust and you’ll be harshing their vibe, you’ll be spoiling things for them. Let them have their moment of pure, fat free content free reality free, splurge not to be cynical or anything. 

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 30, 1983 – Carl Sagan hosts ‘nuking ourselves would be bad’ conference.

October 30, 2006 – Stern Review published.

October 30, 2008 – a worker-greenie coalition? Maybe…

Categories
Australia

September 8, 1972 – Green activist vanishes off face of Earth…

Fifty two years ago, on this day, September 8th, 1972,

On September 8, 1972, [Brenda] Hean, 55, hopped aboard a two-seater World War II Tiger Moth, being flown by experienced pilot Max Price. Leaving from Hobart, they were bound for Canberra to try to win support from federal politicians to stop the flooding of Lake Pedder by Tasmania’s Hydro Electricity Commission.

One of their intentions was to skywrite Save Lake Pedder over the national capital.

The plane never made it, and the bodies and wreckage were never located.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/14/1092340534703.html?from=storylhs

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 420ishppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that there was a federal election coming. The main hope for Tasmanian activists trying to save Lake Pedder from being drowned for a dam was a change of government.

What we learn is that it may well not have been murder, and if it was murder, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was anti-greenies or pro-Lake Pedder people, because apparently the pilot had pissed people off with his, ah “extracurricular activities”. So he may have been the target of sabotage of the plane. In any case wreckage was never found, nobody ever confessed. And as Christine Milne says, Tasmania is a bit different in other places, the truth would come out – not so much in Tasmania. 

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: 

September 8, 1990 – Australian #climate denialist spouting his nonsense…

September 8, 2014 – Lobster boat blockaders have charges dropped.

Categories
United Kingdom

September 2,1972 – BBC Radio speaks of “A Finite Earth”

Fifty two years ago, on this day, September 2nd, 1972,

A Finite Earth BBC Radio 3

First broadcast: Sat 2nd Sep 1972, 21:55 on BBC Radio 3

Professor Dennis Meadows , Dartmouth University, USA, co-author of The Limits to Growth in discussion with Professor Wilfred Beckerman , University College, London, member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. about the concept of using a computerised world model to determine the limits to continued economic growth.

The publication of The Limits to Growth has stimulated renewed controversy In the doomsday debate. Professor Beckerman attacks the assumptions of the report and challenges its conclusions.

Chaired by Michael Peacock

Producer Michael BRIGHT – (see also review of this by David Wade the following week in The Times)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 420ishppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the Limits to Growth report had come out before this, as had the Blueprint for Survival. Since then the Stockholm Conference on the Environment had happened. Everyone was saying, thinking about limits to growth, agreeing, disagreeing, and it was fair fodder for radio programmes where you could have various talking heads. And this is one where Wilfred Beckerman got a chance to talk. He was an economist and he was on the Royal Commission of Environmental Pollution at the time. He was up against Dennis Meadows, one of the LtG authors/.

What we learn is that radio was not all radio gaga, and it was having one of its finest hours. nd the debates that we’re still having in 2024 were being had, then round and round in circles we go where it stops, nobody knows (well, the collapse of western “civ”, obvs). 

What happened next. The sorts of programmes and series kept being produced. Middle-class people kept stroking their chins while accepting promotions and ever greater comfort, believing that the system was fair, was delivering for them, because it was – without thinking about the deeper underlying costs in the long term. There was always such a short-term price to pay. If you go up against “the system” (man).

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: 

September 2, 1972 – Adelaide FOE asks “is technology a blueprint for destruction?” (Spoiler – ‘yes’)

September 2, 1994 – International Negotiating Committee 10th meeting ends

September 2, 2002- Peter Garrett argues “community action” vs #climate change

Categories
Soviet Union

July 15, 1972 – Soviet Weekly on how man affects the weather…

Fifty two years ago, on this day, July 15th, 1972, Soviet Weekly runs a piece based on comments by Mikhail Budyko, “How Man affects the weather.”

“In the past few decades the carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has risen by 1-15 per cent, and it is still rising.

“Most of it comes from the burning of 1,000 million tonnes of coal a year.

“C02 in the atmosphere lets through most short-wave radiation, but considerably reduces long-wave radiation which dissipates heat into space.

“So by the end of the century there could be an all-round rise in the temperature of the atmosphere at the earth’s surface of up to 1 degree.”

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the Soviet Union had been producing this colour newspaper Soviet Weekly, saying how wonderful things were in the Soviet Union for a while. I don’t know who it convinced – it probably merely kept some junior MI5 staff happy when clipping, archiving. And here they were talking about the weather and surprisingly given the Stockholm environment conference had just happened. And they hadn’t attended, because East Germany wasn’t going to be allowed separate status. 

What we learn is that if you were communist or commie-curious, in the early 70s in the UK, then carbon dioxide build-up would have been mentioned to you by Soviet Weekly and probably the Morning Star and Daily Worker and so forth. Everybody knew. 

 What happened next Soviet Weekly continued telling everyone that one life is wonderful in the Soviet Union until 1991, when the Soviet Union was no more. 

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

For more about Budyko, and the probably “hook” for the Soviet Weekly article (besides the then-just-finished UNCHE), see here

A 50-Year-Old Global Warming Forecast That Still Holds Up

Also on this day: 

July 15, 1968 – first(?) UK government attention to the possibility of climate

July 15, 1977 – “Heavy Use of Coal May Bring Adverse Shift in Climate”

July 15, 2005 – The “Stern Review” into #climate is announced…

Categories
Australia

June 18,1972 – Patrick White becomes a reluctant greenie activist

Fifty two years ago, on this day, June 18th, 1972 Australian author Patrick White, who would next year win the Nobel Prize for Literature, got involved in politics, very very reluctantly.

“On 18 June 1972, Patrick White made his début as a public speaker from the back of a truck in Sydney’s Centennial Park. He was there to address a rally against the state government’s plan to turn the area into a sports centre, which would have ruined the ecology and amenity of the park.” 

Peter Ferguson “Patrick White, green bans and the rise of the Australian new left”.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that Sydney was in the grip of the developers who could only see dollar signs. The unions were trying to stop them. Civil society was trying to stop them. And even Patrick White, the intensely private, Australian writer who was about to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was reluctantly willing to use his status to help the cause.

What we learn is that social resistance to the megamachine/the Juggernaut requires a full court press from not just workers but artists. A popular front you could almost say. And even then, its victories will be partial, because greed is astonishingly motivating. You could almost say that capitalism is a form of acid eating away at institutions to coin a phrase entirely. De novo. 

What happened next, Patrick White won the Nobel. Sydney was not entirely paved over, but that’s no thanks to the politicians. What was saved was saved by popular pressure forcing them to be slightly less short-sighted, albeit briefly. 

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: 

June 18, 1976- UK Meteorological Office explains things to Cabinet Office

June 18, 2008 – Carbon Capture and Storage is going to save Australia. Oh yes.

June 18, 2013 – Feeble ’Wind Fraud’ rally in Canberra

Categories
International processes Sweden

June 12, 1972 – At Stockholm “development” is challenged 

Fifty-two years ago, on this day, June 12th, 1972, the idea of One True Path To Wealth got questions by Barbara Ward and Margaret Mead.

NGOs, too, soon challenged the U.S. delegation’s platform. In a statement to the plenary session on June 12, a collection of NGOs, led by Barbara Ward and American anthropologist Margaret Mead, strongly criticised existing notions of development. In the development process, there needed to be “a greater emphasis on non-material satisfactions . . . and, above all, altruism in the pursuit of the common good.” Ward and Mead argued that technical fixes – more production – would not solve developmental problems, because a balance between environment and development “can be achieved only if we face honestly the problem of social justice and redistribution.” More concretely, they called for a tiny percent of GNP to be allocated in grants and low-interest for long-term loans for concessionary assistance and for additional flows of capital assistance from the developed nations to offset costs in the developing world. 132 “NGO Plenary Declaration,” Reprinted in Special Issue: The Stockholm Conference, Not Man Apart, 

Vol. 2, No. 7 (July 1972), 8-10. ABOVE IS A QUOTE from page 170 of “Of limits and growth” – phd thesis by Stephen Macekura

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327.5ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that developing nations had been deeply suspicious of the agenda – in every sense – of the Western nations in calling for this conference on the human environment. They saw it as another way of the West restricting the economic development of what was then called the Third World. There had been a conference in Founex (which is I think, in Switzerland) in 1971 to allay some of these concerns.

Fun fact, only one world leader was there besides Olof Palme, Indira Gandhi of India. And these fights about what development meant and who it was for and who would be in charge of it were turning up of course, both at the conference itself, and at the People’s Conference, and so forth. 

What we learn is that how you see the world very much depends whether you are serving or eating. In the words of Leonard Cohen, homicidal bitchin’ goes down in every kitchen. And the main problem has been a lack of trust. And Western nations have done nothing to earn that trust. 

What happened next? The Stockholm conference gave us some fine words but it also gave us the United Nations Environment Program, headquartered in Nairobi, a lot smaller than was hoped but powerful enough to co-sponsor with WMO a series of meetings about climate change.

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: 

June 12, 1992 – Australia refuses to put a tax on carbon: “It’s a question of who starts the ball rolling. We won’t.”

June 12, 2011 – Nazi smears used by denialists, obvs

Categories
United Kingdom Wales

May 22, 1972 – Horizon doco “Do you Dig National Parks?”

Fifty-two years ago, on this day, May 22nd, 1972, the BBC showed an influential documentary about national parks and how the protections people thought they had were being undermined…

Outcry from the Conservation Society, Friends of the Earth and other groups led the BBC to run a Horizon documentary called Do You Dig National Parks May 22 1972

FOE’s collaboration with television teams led, in September 1971, to a Granada TV production entitled “A Subject Called Ecology in a Place Called Capel Hermon,” and, in May 1972, to a BBC Horizon production called “Do You Dig National Parks?” In the discussion which formed the latter half of the Horizon program, FOE spokesmen Graham Searle and Amory Lovins, manifesting a grasp of open-pit mining technology and economics at least equal to that of their adversaries, methodically dissected the arguments put forward by RTZ Vice-Chairman Roy Wright and one of his colleagues. Suddenly it began to be conceivable that FOE and its allies – who now included many of the local people in Snowdonia – might have a chance of winning.

Walt Patterson – https://www.waltpatterson.org/foertz.pdf

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the nascent environment/protest movement in the UK was worried about what was being done to national parks by Rio Tinto and other mining companies. This documentary exposed that and helped raise public awareness and make some of the decisions more costly and unpalatable for politicians.

What we learn is that documentaries can matter. 

What happened next, the environment movement kept growing sort of though, things kind of became harder from ‘73 onwards partly because of fatigue and old news-itis but also the oil shock and economic problems up the wazoo. 

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: 

May 22, 2007 – “Clean coal” power station by 2014, honest…

May 22 – Build Back Biodiversity: International Biodiversity Day

Categories
Australia

May 15, 1972 – Clean Air Conference in Melbourne

Fifty-two years ago, on this day, May 15th, 1972, a Clean Air Conference in Melbourne is told about carbon dioxide build up by CSIRO scientists, including Graeme Pearman,

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that there had been clean air conferences in states and now national or even international in Australia.

There had been the Senate Select Committee on Air Pollution started in 1968 delivering its findings in ‘69. And what’s particularly significant about this conference is the first time there was an explicit specific session on carbon dioxide build up, with Graham Pearman.

What we learn – oh, the usual – we knew, we knew, we knew.

What happened next – more reports, more warnings, paths not taken. And now we are on a path that leads nowhere nice. It didn’t have to be like this, but it does have to be like it’s going to be – laws of physics are like that.

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: 

May 15, 2006 – Australian Prime Minister John Howard spouting “nuclear to fix climate” nonsense

May 15, 2010 – another pointless overnight vigil.

Categories
United Kingdom

February 21, 1972 – Horizon and the backlash against “selling doomsday”

Fifty two years ago, on this day, February 21st, 1972, BBC’s Horizon programme focussed on the “overselling” of ecological concerns.

Horizon – “How They Sold Doomsday”  21-2–1972 – In this episode, Horizon looks the the ecological movement, and the resistance against the movement in Britain, and the USA.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that a backlash against ecological concerns had been underway for a couple of years, and was here picking up momentum.

What we learn

Ecological thinking makes rich, technologically-obsessed, powerful people feel extremely uncomfortable. The idea that there might be limits, to use the apposite word, to their prowess and that the thing that they have thought good, that they have devoted their life to is actually quite bad, is threatening to their sense of self.

Rather than sit and contemplate that idea for any length of time, they obviously find something else to do which is shoot the messenger and attack. And of course, there are always some of the messengers who can plausibly be attacked because they have over-egged the pudding or gone to overconfident predictions. But the core of the message is accurate. And so a straw man gets set up rather than a steel man. And the steel man would have made us all smarter and maybe safer. It wasn’t to be…

What happened next. The attacks on the message and the messengers continued. For example, John Maddox, editor of Nature, has a book called “The Doomsday Syndrome”. And then these were recycled in the 1980s and 90s and in fact down unto this day.

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: 

 Feb 21, 1978 – “Carbon dioxide, climate and society” workshop

Feb 21, 1995 – an invitation to engage in the IPCC is declined, again…

Categories
United Kingdom

February 16, 1972 – Dept of Env boss “we can’t be complacent”

Fifty-two years ago, on this day, February 17th, 1972, the first UK Environment Minister says “we can’t be complacent.”

In February 1972, Peter Walker, the Environment Secretary, wrote to Edward Heath ‘about the problems said to be in store on a world scale as a result of conflicts between present trends in population and economic growth requiring greater and greater amounts of energy and natural resources’.31 ‘While much of the argument … is extreme, apocalyptic and naıve’, argued Walker, citing both the Limits to Growth and A Blueprint for Survival, the influential green manifesto written by Edward Goldsmith and which had been published in The Ecologist the month before, ‘I do not think we can be complacent about the issues it raises’. After summarizing a ‘creditable list’ of environmental policies, Walker nevertheless stressed that the dangers, if they occur, are sufficiently great that in my view a case has been established to justify the UK Government in taking part … in further work to broaden the existing analysis both in width and depth.

The immediate need would seem to be to decide on the most appropriate way, within Government, of handling the further work that is required … What seems necessary is a central capability, built round a Research Group, within Government … [to] work on the techniques on lines complementary to those being pursued by MIT and elsewhere. TNA CAB 164/1182. Walker to Heath, 16 February 1972. This important letter was copied to Alec Douglas-Home, Tony Barber, Willie Whitelaw, George Jellicoe, John Davies, Jim Prior, William Armstrong, Burke Trend and Lord Rothschild

Agar, 2015

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the environment conference in Stockholm, proposed by Sweden and then accepted by the UN General Assembly in 1968, was imminent.. Meanwhile, the Limits to Growth report was about to come out, and the Blueprint for Survival already had. There was the general aura of apocalypse.  

What we learn is smart people, powerful people were paying serious attention to these issues. It’s easy to blame them for not having done more or not having succeeded. Can we curse people from 50 years ago? Of course, we will be cursed in 50 years or in, in fact, in five years. 

What happened next 

The Stockholm Conference happened. And that kind of gave everyone an invitation to stop thinking about environmental issues, which they gleefully took. It’s no fun staring into the abyss.

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: 

Feb 16, 2005- The Kyoto Protocol shambles into futile existence, despite Uncle Sam’s best efforts

February 16, 2007 – Liberals say climate is a “mass panic”