All Our Yesterdays – climate histories for the future

Hi,

at the start of the second year of All Our Yesterdays – 365+ Climate Histories here’s a few basic facts.

Please do ask questions, share this post, comment.
Best wishes

Marc Hudson

What it is

A website (and associated twitter feed) with at least one entry for every day of the year about something that happened on that day – stretching back to the 1950s but especially from the 1970s onwards – around climate science, politics, protest and technology. I’ve already done it for all of 2022, with some great guests posts from various friends (see here).

Why it is

Generally I am very curious about how much we knew, when (i.e.. before the great Thatcher Awakening of 1988) and how little has been achieved since then.  All Our Yesterdays is one way of coping with that pathological curiosity, while also (fingers crossed) making what I have found out useful for other people.

What is different about this year

This year I’ve decided to orient the posts more to “what we can learn from this?” – whether it is a tactic used by the opponents of action, or a bit of the science that is worth remembering, or the backstory to some of the technologies and policies that are still getting a lot of attention (lookin’ at YOU, carbon capture and storage).

I’m also keen to expand beyond the relatively “three country”  focus – many many posts have been about Australia (where I am originally from), the United Kingdom (where I now live) and the United States (in the words of Leonard Cohen, “the cradle of the best and of the worst”). In the first month of 2023 there are posts from  New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, but these of course are also part of the Anglosphere….

How I want people to use it

My dream is people learn about a tactic that has been used in the past, and then when they see the same tactic being used now by denialists or delayers they can say (and tweet!) “oh, this is just a re-tread of what they did [twenty five/thirty years] ago. ” Or that people use the site to think – on their own and with the friends and colleagues – about how protest groups around climate have tended to go up like a rocket and come tumbling down like a stick.

If you have a date you think is worth writing about, please check out to see if I have (see here),and then if I haven’t email me.  (I may already know about it, but I’d rather get repeat suggestions than not at all).

If you want to write a guest post about something, do get in touch.

And, as I write on every post What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.