ABSTRACT
Editors’ note This chapter introduces us to the manner in which the political process confronts the perceived threat of global warming. What it does not fully establish is why a long-term and uncertain threat has been accepted as sufficiently real to warrant attention within the short-term decision-making process of democratic politics, although there are some clues given. It points out that the political process at both international and national levels is actually running faster than increases in scientific knowledge-in other words, that the political process, once started, has its own momentum, at least for a while. In an address in London in 1994 Sir John Mason, an eminent atmospheric scientist closely connected with the development of global circulation models, actually argued that the scientists now knew that global warming would not occur as fast as originally thought, and told the political community to reduce its anxieties and activities for the next decade, while giving the scientists huge sums of money to improve their knowledge of the deep oceans. Part of the answer to the riddle may be that the public, in Australia in this chapter, are concerned over green issuesand of course urban areas have their quota of local atmospheric pollution. This the politicians know, and at the international level, as Ros Taplin points out, the greenhouse issue can symbolise the interconnectedness of the global ecosystem. There is no doubt that the international community is competitive in terms of agenda setting and the gathering of Brownie points, as pointed out in Chapter 1 in the case of Rostow’s ‘take-off’ and the UN Development Decade. Now, postBrundtland, instead of ‘fast forward’, we have as ‘visions of the world or the future’ (Godard, quoted by Taplin below) the concepts of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘hold-fast’ (stabilise emissions). The Brownie points can be gathered now by entering into rather vague and long-term commitments. When it comes to working out a strategy for local implementation, however, short-term and much more certain realities tend to prevail: negative economic impacts such as the closing of certain industries are not allowed. Taplin illustrates all these points and many more in showing how after the rhetoric the Australian Strategy evolved into a plan of little change. The chapter is complemented neatly by John Gordon’s following chapter, which concentrates mostly on a similar pattern of events in the UK.
