Raising Hell: Issue 74: A Patriotic Duty To The Coal Industry
"If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't." - Hyman, G Rickover, US Navy admiral, New York Times, 3 November 1986
It’s not very often you get to investigate a mystery. In my line of work, they come up every now and then, as it did this week during research. This particular conspiracy can be found in the footnotes of Guy Pearse’s Phd thesis. For those who have absolutely no idea what that means: this thesis was an explosive document that exposed how a small group of highly organised business interests — who referred to themselves as the “Greenhouse Mafia” — lobbied aggressively to kill Australia’s attempts to act on climate change.
Pearse himself had begun the thesis after working as a Liberal party staffer. He had watched his boss come under attack from within his own party for pushing John Howard to do more on climate change. The figure responsible for those attacks was Senator Warwick Parer, a man later found to have personally owned $2m in coal mine shares. Pearse became curious about the lobbying tactics of the country’s heaviest emitters and what he found over the course of his research disgusted him. When he published his thesis, he did so with sections of the raw transcript in the footnotes — probably because he thought no one would believe him.
This thesis would become the basis of an ABC documentary on The Greenhouse Mafia, and Pearse himself would later write his own book on the subject — but it’s the Phd where the hard data can be found. I was going back over for research when I noticed the following story in the footnotes:
There’s more but I cut the second image for length. Naturally, this caught my attention. Public servants involved in a conspiracy to physically remove a chanter of a national energy policy because of their loyalty to the coal industry? Now that’s a story. As far as I’m aware, no one has ever bothered to verify this anecdote, so I thought I’d try to run it down.
My first challenge was to recognise that Guy Pearse was a guy who, annoyingly, kept his word. Just as he kept his promise to anonymise his sources, he also rendered the published sections of their transcripts faithfully. This meant he didn’t fix up their mistakes.
It was an issue I ran into almost immediately when someone kindly agreed to check out the physical copy of Energy 2000, sitting in the Parliamentary Library in Canberra, on my behalf. I wasn’t sure what they would find, but if I imaged a gap in the page numbers or something glaringly obvious like a listed chapter that was missing, I would be disappointed. That would be far too easy.
The first thing I learned is that the printed copy of Energy 2000 was actually ten volumes, not twelve:
And as my co-conspirator flicked through, it turned out the only mention of what the document calls the “so-called ‘greenhouse effect’” occurs in Volume 4, which covers the operation of the coal industry:
It goes on, but I haven’t included the addition paragraphs for length. Though the number of pages in each volume was interesting data that revealed the priorities of the publisher, it still was not helpful in identifying whether anything was missing.
Overview - 69 pages
Petroleum - 38 pages
Electricity - 23 pages
Coal - 22 pages
Natural gas - 31 pages
Renewable Energy -16 pages
Synfuels - 30 pages
R&D - 28 pages
Energy conservation - 66 pages
Energy Demand Scenarios - 35 pages
Though this is a good indicator of where the priorities of the authors lay, it is still not clear a volume is missing. At this point in the process I hit a road block; there is currently no evidence of any missing volume but we know that someone close to the process bragged that it existed and had been removed. Though they were wrong about the precise details, they were clearly not lying. Specifically, they say “it is very obvious” there is information missing. Why? The only way that would be true is if they were around for the creation of the policy — which begs the question, how was it created?
The clue lies in additional context the source provides; Energy 2000 was a Hawke-era policy that originated in a big national conference attended by the business community. If greenhouse was discussed at the conference, it would have been recorded and some mention of it would have made it into the internal drafts. All this material would have been archived. And it turns out, the National Archives have a bunch of this stuff on file. It just seems no one has yet come looking, so I asked them to pull a copy:
Until they respond, we wait — and when I get some answers the faithful subscribers to Raising Hell, will be the first to know.
Like investigations? Love politics? Walter Marsh, friend of Raising Hell, has a new book about on the early days of Rupert Murdoch through Scribe. Walter delved into the archives to find out when the future media baron broke bad. Pre-order now.
For the Fortnight: April 26 to May 9
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
No new publications, but it’s going to be a hectic couple of weeks with a trip to the Canberra planned and another upcoming conference.
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
We Are Not A Serious People
The old man in the fancy hate has been sprinkled with oil by the wizards of fate and has achieved his final form as the King of England. The Coronation of King Charles III was a subdued affairs, pared back from three hours to two and inclusive of the golden cabbage. Of course those anti-monarchist party-poopers were arrest in droves, but the good news is none of us had to think about them too long as we were invited “witness history”. Australians, meanwhile, weren’t left out in the cold. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a republican, was invited to swear allegiance to the German king of England and ultimate scion of inherited wealth, while Peter Dutton, the avid monarchist, was forced to sit one out. A world away, the Australian people were invited to “cry out” to swear their allegiance to the new King — which begs the question, did you?
Becoming What You Hate
What do young people do in this country to catch a break? The housing market is impossible, HECS debt is rising with inflation, a climate-shocked future is on the horizon and both wings of the political divide seem intent on fucking them over yet again. This time around, the Albanese government, confronted with a growing and determined coalition calling for the rate of social security to be raised so those forced to rely on it aren’t confined to crushing, desperate poverty, has flagged that, yeah-nah, they’re only going to bump payments for those aged 55 or above by $50 a fortnight — less than a dollar for each year they’ve been alive. This revelation was contained with a leak which prompted so much rage the government attempted to reposition. Last week the government was giving a nod-and-a-wink that it will raise payments across the board by $20 a week — $5 less than the Tories did under Morrison and on Monday it announced a special arrangement for parents with kids to make up for that time Julia Gillard cut payments for single mothers back to the bone. Whether or not this situation develops positively will be revealed in the next few hours, but hey, we can all breathe easy that those Stage 3 Tax Cuts are still on foot.
Out Of Touch, Out Of Mind
Never fear though, beating up the poor and downtrodden remains firmly a bipartisan issue with Opposition leader Peter Dutton telling 2GB Sydney that he would “bring back Work for the Dole” were he Prime Minister. Unfortunately for the esteemed opposition leader, Work for the Dole never went away — for that to happen federal Labor would have to differentiate itself from the Coalition by says, abolishing it along with Compulsory Income Management — a mealy-mouthed pre-election committed which resulted in the cashless debit card being removed but the Basics Card being kept. At this point the feeling seems to be that among Labor-right hard heads running the shop, being Labor is a political risk.
When They Just Stop Pretending
Western Australian police have taken it upon themselves to set a new bar professionalism, having raided the homes of two journalists. Eliza Kloser was shooting photographs of ancient Indigenous rock art being removed from a site to build a fertiliser factory from a public road before she was stopped by police and later had her home raided. Meanwhile, another campaigner and journalist Jesse Noakes also had his home raided days by a counter-terrorism unit after he published an article in The Saturday Paper about the growing repression of climate activists out west. His alleged crime? Maybe, possibly knowing something about protests being carried out against Woodside during its agenda. None of this should be any surprise though given how Woodside is among the companies that have enjoyed $57.1bn in fossil fuel subsidies in the year since the “climate election” brought the Albanese government to power.
Sincerity Kills
Are you a Russian conscript currently engaged in an illegal war of occupation against a neighbouring state? Do you know how to find cover? Handle a grenade? No? Well, never fear. To compensate for the sub-par training offered to the average Russian infantryman, cartoons in the style of the video game Fallout have been circulating on Telegram — just without the irony. As VICE reports, one grim cartoon advises how it is a bad idea to find cover behind a car, how to properly dig a trench, raise trip lines and conduct flanking maneuvers. Cool and good.
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
We here at Raising Hell’s elite satire unit know the rest of the country doesn’t like to remember South Australia, but there was a surprise story between the headlines. One Nation MLC Sarah Game bravely stood in the state’s parliament and moved a motion to declare, among other things, “there are two genders, male and female”. Not only that but Game was praised in this act of bravery by the Australian Christian Lobby who described Game as “very sensible” and praised her for “properly [calling] out the cruel confusion being created in the minds of our most precious resource - our children”. The irony of course is the amount of time Game has spent think about dicks and pussies on a public dime — your tax dollars at work!
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight. If some are behind the paywall, get yourself a 12ftladder…
Not journalism but a great example of how to troll your landlord.
Tim Colebatch writing in Inside Story has this incisive analysis of the “steady-as-she-goes” Albanese government and the risk this chill vibe is going to bleed more of its left wing base to the Greens.
Here’s an recording of Brown University Professor Mark Blyth interviewing David de Jong about “Nazi Billionaires, Capitalist Ethics and Other Notable Contradictions” on the Rhodes Centre Podcast.
Charlie LeDuff has been a big influence on me and my works are often littered with references to his writings. Here’s a longer interview with Charlie LeDuff by Steve Friess.
If you’ve heard about the Net Zero Australia study, here’s a write up by Michael Barnard in Clean Technica about all the ways it’s bad — and not just because it’s been funded by fossil fuel companies and chemical corporations, among others.
Here’s a great investigation by ProPublica into coal mining companies in the US have been gaming the bankruptcy process in order to escape its obligations to rehabilitate their environmental damage.
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal — contact me first for how. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!