Carbon dioxide | The Monthly

How vested interests defeated climate science

A Dark Victory

By Robert Manne

Some 20 years ago, climate scientists arrived at the conclusion that the vast acceleration in the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution was causing the temperature of the Earth to rise. Almost all agreed that we were facing a genuine crisis. Some came to believe that we were facing a catastrophe deeper than any other in the history of the human

Forgotten People, Elites and Class Warfare

Once Were Warriors

By Nick Dyrenfurth

On 18 January 1886, a remarkable letter to the editor appeared in the pages of the conservative Argus newspaper as a bitter wharfies’ strike brought ‘marvellous Melbourne’ to a near standstill. Its author, Bruce Smith, variously president of the Victorian Shipowners’ Association and Victorian Employers’ Union, boasted that he was the “best abused man of the day”. He went on: &nb

The Coal Industry’s Coal-fed Algae Plan

Coal’s Next Alibi

By Guy Pearse

Imagine a supermarket called Coal’s where everything in your trolley was made with algae fed with carbon dioxide from a large industrial facility, such as a coal-fired power station. On your way in, the smiling coalmining union boss Tony Maher might greet you from a poster, saying, as he does: “Coal … It’s organic.” There’d be meat and fish raised on coal-based algal meal, bread, pasta, cereals, biscuits, dairy products, pet

Renewable Energy

Comment

By Guy Pearse

Every year the sunburnt country receives enough solar energy from above to meet its current annual energy consumption for 10,000 years. From below, there’s enough geothermal energy for 2.6 million years. An endless and impatient queue of ‘roaring 40s’ weather systems rolls from the west across Australia’s south bringing some of the world’s best win

After Copenhagen

Comment

By Robert Manne

Over 200 years ago human beings began burning large quantities of the coal, oil and natural gas that had been buried under the Earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. This may eventually come to be seen as the most fatal misstep in the history of

Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’

Cold Turkey

By Peter Singer

Jonathan Safran Foer is a talented novelist with a gift for writing amusingly about serious issues. In Everything Is Illuminated (2003), he created a Ukrainian narrator, Alex, who describes in hilarious detail his work assisting an American Jew – named Jonat

James Lovelock’s "The Vanishing Face of Gaia"

Goodbye to All That

By Tim Flannery

When the Wind Blows

By Mungo MacCallum

A Short History of Pyromania

By Edward Scheer

Global Warming

Comment

By Robert Manne

2005 was the warmest year in the history of Australia and the second warmest in the history of the Earth since records have been kept. Ten of the Earth’s 11 warmest years have occurred since 1990. The European summer of 2003 was so hot that, according to the