Twenty-nine years ago, on this day, January 25, 1995 the tension between making lots of money in the near-future and doing something about climate change became obvious.
AUSTRALIA’S electricity reforms and greenhouse policy appear to be headed in contradictory directions. While senior Federal ministers concede that a carbon tax would not be a single solution to meeting greenhouse targets, demand management reforms that would have a substantial impact on greenhouse emissions have been proposed by a working party of the National Grid Management Council. Yet the latest drafts of that report suggest that the NGMC will step back from critical recommendations. On December 7, the NGMC’s working party on demand management in the emerging competitive power market, produced a third draft that listed three specific options – Budget allocations, an energy efficiency levy or tax incentives – to promote energy efficiency. But when the “final draft” was produced on January 25 by the NGMC itself – in preparation for its ultimate submission to the Council of Australian Governments – each of these recommendations was substantially different…
1995 Gill. M. 1995. The meek take the running on electricity reform. Australian Financial Review, 13 February, p.12.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that state owned electricity systems in the states of Australia, were busy being privatised. The idea was also to have a national grid excluding Tasmania, but still excluding Western Australia, because there was money to be made. And of course, if you had to have greenhouse, and environment considerations included, that would interfere with rich white people getting even richer. And we can’t have that now, can we? Because that would be communism.
What we learn – failure was systematically baked in.
What happened next? Everybody knows the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost. Greenhouse was kept out of the documents that set up the Australian energy market and all of that who had the national grid. And this is a good part – by no means the only part but a good part – of why Australia has had until recently astonishingly high carbon intensity in its electricity generation. I mean, brown coal, I ask you.
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:
January 25, 1994: UK government releases “Sustainable Development Strategy”
January 25, 2013 – Lord Stern admits #climate “worse than I thought”