Nineteen years ago, on this day, October 23rd, 2007,
“We now face nothing less than a global emergency. We must rapidly reduce carbon emissions and encourage alternative energy sources, far faster than either government or opposition are prepared to acknowledge, and begin preparations for a global oil shortage. This is not an extreme view; the extremists are those in government and business who have been in denial for the past decade,.”
Dunlop, I. Climate change is a war that we must fight. The Age. October 23
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 384ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was Australians had been warned vehemently and thoroughly about the greenhouse effect in the late 1980s and had gone back to sleep. They had woken up in late 2006 for various reasons, including the seemingly never-ending millennium drought, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and so on.
This wave of concern was something that Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd was willing to ride entirely cynically, it now turns out, all the way to becoming Prime Minister. Anyway, the denialists also sprang back into life, of course, and it was a culture war, on for young and old.
The specific context was that the agonisingly slow and stupid process of having green papers and white papers and all the other papers about emissions trading was ongoing and enabling people to have endless fucking debates about the merits of X, Y and Z. Ian Dunlop had been head of the president of the Australian Coal Association for a year and had since changed sides, as it were, and here we are completely fucked.
What I think we can learn from this is that we’ve been arguing about doing anything for so long that the moment has passed.
Settler colonies are particularly badly placed to deal with wicked and super wicked problems, because settler colonies are all about exploiting so-called untapped resources and having contempt for indigenous knowledge, fragility limits, etc. If you had any concern or respect, you’d be a very poor settler colonist.
What happened next. The climate wars never really ended. There are brief ceasefires. There has been a bit of a change since, in which the Liberals have given up all pretence of giving any shit about 19th century physics.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
Also on this day:
October 23, 1955 – LA Times article says “our weather is changing”
October 23, 1989 – Republican Governor of New Jersey issues climate executive order