Thirty years ago, on this day, February 3rd, 1994, the fossil fuel lobby was trotting out its favourite argument – that Australia was being treated “unfairly” in the climate negotiations, and throwing “developing countries” in to make it a more confusing message and one harder to counter.
Australia and the developing economies of the world could bear an unfairly high proportion of the costs of controls on greenhouse emissions in the event of any global agreement to adopt uniform emission-reduction targets, the Outlook 94 conference was told yesterday.
Grose, S. 1994. Unfair burden’ on Australia. Canberra Times, February, 4, p.4.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 357.2ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that President Clinton’s energy tax had been defeated the year before. But it simply wasn’t clear that a carbon tax was dead in Australia too. And the whole question of Australia’s commitments under the climate treaty, which had been ratified, and previous December, was making rich fossil fuel outfits nervous. And so at “Outlook 94”, which was one of the energy sector’s watering holes and ideas-swapping or meme-swapping opportunities. They, including John Daley, were pushing hard on the old idea that Australia was a special case that was being unfairly treated.
What we can learn is the rhetoric of unfairness is pervasive, and that bullies and assholes will often deny, attack, reverse victim order – DARVO.
What happened next?
The proponents of climate action put their eggs in the carbon tax basket which was entirely sensible to their eyes. And they were defeated. The emissions kept climbing. And you know the rest.
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 3, 2009 – Physical encirclement of parliament easier than ideological or political. #auspol
February 3, 2015 – UK tries to puzzle out industrial decarbonisation