On this day, October 11 2006 the then new “Climate Institute” began a tour of rural Victoria…
A group calling itself the Climate Institute has started a tour of centres across the eastern states calling for action on climate change.
A panel of four, two farmers, a scientist and a wind power expert, spoke at a public meeting in the south-eastern Victorian city of Sale last night.
The group was started by a Hamilton grazier financed by a trust linked with the Murdoch media empire.
Panel member and former CSIRO scientist Graeme Peerman says farmers will be the first and hardest hit by climate change.
“At the federal level we don’t have an energy strategy, we have a document called ‘securing Australia’s energy futures’ which is a grab bag of all of the bits and pieces that you might have together, but nowhere in there is a real clear strategy as to how we build the real balance,” he said.
Sale hears push for climate change strategy ABC, 12 October 2006
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2006-10-12/sale-hears-push-for-climate-change-strategy/1284712?pfm=ms
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 379.33ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – Australia was waking up to climate change, thanks in part to the Millennium Drought, which seemed endless. Internationally, things were moving. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had been released, the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report was coming.
The Climate Institute had been set up the year before, and was beginning to make waves
Why this matters.
We have tried. We have tried and we have failed. Good to remember this…
What happened next?
The Climate Institute kept going, shutting up shop in 2017. See my Conversation piece on it going under