Fifty years ago, on this day, March 18th 2008, Guy Pearse made his submission to the Garnaut Review, “Protecting Australia’s new climate change response from the Climate mafia”.
Reading the fine print on emissions trading
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 385ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that Australian political elites have been receiving warnings about carbon dioxide build up, really, since 1986, which would be a good date to start.
I mean, obviously there’s also stuff in the late 1970s and the Office of National Assessments fossil fuels in the greenhouse, though it’s not clear to me how that was distributed and who talked about it.
National Party senators were also talking about the carbon dioxide problem as well in the early 1980s…
Then, to understand this story, you have to understand that Guy Pearse, (not the actor), had been a young Liberal staffer and speech writer who had gone to the States and then ended up working on briefly, on the Al Gore campaign rather than Republicans in ‘88 because he was switched on to environment and especially climate.
But the Liberal Party was not welcoming place for people concerned about environment and climate, in part, because of the Dolchstuss myth, the stab in the back from 1990.
Pearse had then been working as a lobbyist, and realised that lots of his friends were busy undermining climate policy, in the agriculture, tourism, et cetera, positions.
He had then done a PhD part time where he basically interviewed his friends and constructed a really brilliant PhD about this. He had done this PhD at Australian National University and with Clive Hamilton as one of his supervisors. Hamilton had already written a book called Running from the Storm about climate policy.
And Pearse’s work had been exposed to the public in 2006 thanks to an ABC Four Corners documentary on the greenhouse mafia.
The specific context was that alongside all of this in late 2006 partly with thanks to things like the Four Corners documentary, the climate issue had exploded into public consciousness and the new Labor leader of the opposition, Kevin Rudd was using Iraq and a scandal about grain supplies and climate change as his two principal sticks with which to beat long-serving Prime Minister John Howard.
And one of Rudd’s stunts was to ask economist Ross Garnaut to write a report about the economics of climate change to inform whatever policy degree the Rudd Government, if it were to happen, would put in place. So this was called the Garnaut Review, and here we see Guy Pearse trying to drop some truth bombs.
But “you people can’t handle the truth,” etc, etc.
What I think we can learn from this is that if you really want to understand a document like this, you have to understand the back story. That takes time and there’s only so many hours in the day. But enough whining about methodology!
What else we learn is that Australian policy elites have been grappling with the climate problem with some success. If your success metric is how to make it look like you’re taking action without taking action.
That has become more difficult over time, because people get wise, get – you can call it “cynical”, – but I would call it sensible.
What happened next
Garnaut produced his report, but it was sidelined because he was going to demand too much of Rudd, who didn’t want to upset rich donors, etc. Rudd got toppled and Garnaut got brought back to inform Gillard’s climate policy process. Pearse kept writing about it for a while, but I think eventually realised that it was a lost cause.
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
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Also on this day:
March 18, 1958 – Military man spots carbon dioxide problem
March 18, 1968 – Bobby Kennedy vs Gross National Product
March 18, 1970 – Ministry of Transport says “exhaust emission is a minor pollution problem not warranting public expenditure“
March 18, 1971 – “Weather modification took a macro-pathological turn”
March 18, 2010 – “Solar” by Ian McEwan released.
March 18, 2022 – Antarctic has a day 38.5 degrees above seasonal average
