Satanic gas: the politics of carbon dioxide.(Environment)

CARBON IS THE SIXTH element in the periodic table. It is unique among the elements in the vast number and variety of compounds it can form. With hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements, it forms a very large number of compounds. There are close to ten million known carbon compounds, many thousands of which are vital to organic and life processes. Carbon is essential for life.

As we now see in the Commonwealth government's Green Paper,

Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and newspaper sub-headings ("Carbon's a diabolical foe"--Australian Financial Review) carbon is now being demonised by the media and by ministers of the Crown.

How did we get to a situation where fantasy has triumphed over reality?

We can begin this episode in the battle over the demonisation of carbon with the testimony given by James Hansen, a scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to the US Senate Committee chaired by Al Gore (then Senator for Tennessee). The date was June 20, 1988, a date which had been predicted as likely to be hot and humid in Washington. Hansen told the Committee that he was "99 per cent sure ... the [human caused] greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now." He stated that his claim was based on computer models and temperature measurements. We now know that the night before the hearing, the air-conditioning had been turned off and the windows opened, so that the committee room was hot and very humid and the television cameras were able to focus on the sweat dripping off the various participants.

At the same time the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, anxious to revive the nuclear power industry in Britain (which had been badly tarnished by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster) encouraged the Royal Society, with substantial benefactions, to rally behind the "carbon dioxide is a pollutant" doctrine, in order to get the Greens, deeply hostile to nuclear power, sidelined out of the debate. This particular ploy was used by John Howard from time to time, and for the same reason. It was a particularly stupid ploy, in that it was obvious to anybody who understood what was driving the Greens that they were never, ever, going to countenance, let alone embrace, nuclear power; and at the same time it legitimised Green claims about the evils of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.

The carbon-dioxide-as-pollutant doctrine then swept through the Western world like a firestorm. The environmentalist movement, naturally, promoted it with energy and flair, and the Left, then subdued by the rapid collapse of communism, embraced it with alacrity. The elite classes also got on board and Andrew Peacock, for example, took the Liberal Party into the 1990 election with a commitment "to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2010".