For a bloke on a very large pension, former Prime Minister the not-so-honourable Tony Abbott is working very hard for the Institute of Public Affairs these days. His latest IPA speech in London was outrageously stupid, playing down the climate crisis even as his own country burns and the international numbers confirm the situation is more dire than ever.
Widely reported by Murdoch media, Mr Abbott was speaking at the launch of a document called Energy Security is National Security, as part of the ironically named Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in the UK last week.
‘The climate cult will inevitably be discredited,’ he said. ‘I just hope we don’t have to endure an energy catastrophe before that happens.’
Flying cheerfully in the face of the overwhelming majority of scientific expertise, Mr Abbott claimed warnings about the climate emergency were ‘ahistorical and utterly implausible’, citing as evidence previous climate variations which took place prior to the burning of fossil fuels, such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly.
Unfortunately for Abbott’s thesis, and those of us hoping for a liveable future on this planet, research from NASA and others show that these events did not affect the whole globe at once, and were nowhere near as severe as what we’re facing now, with July probably being the hottest month our planet has seen in 100,000 years, and international scientists recently warning that Earth’s life systems were being pushed into ‘dangerous instability’ by human activity.
Cost of living or going extinct?
Ignoring all that, Tony Abbott said last week that he believed voters would continue prioritising cost of living and energy price issues over serious action on emissions reduction.
Forgetting that time in 2019 when he lost his blue ribbon seat of Warringah to an independent who campaigned heavily for urgent climate action, Abbott said ‘on every occasion in Australia where energy policy and climate policy has been a big election focus, it’s the people who have been on the sceptical end of the spectrum who have done well.’
The issue has certainly kept him in the public eye between media-friendly moments of budgie-smuggling and raw onion eating. In 2009, Tony Abbott described climate change as ‘absolute crap’ and in 2017 he said attempts to do something about emissions were akin to ‘primitive people once killing goats to appease the volcano gods’. The former trainee Jesuit priest remains completely out of step on the climate issue with his own supposed spiritual leader, Pope Francis.
By getting rid of Julia Gillard’s mis-named ‘carbon tax’ while in office, perhaps our last best hope as a nation to do something about the crisis, Mr Abbott set in motion a series of events which led to the current Labor government’s proposal for net zero emissions, now his public enemy number one as he campaigns for more dirty energy.
He described the Albanese plan to reach 82 per cent renewables by 2030 as utterly irrational and ‘impossible’, leading Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen in turn to accuse Abbott and his ilk for being responsible for ‘a decade of catastrophic climate policy’.
Nasty solar
As for the IPA report itself, the stupidity just keeps coming. ‘If wind and solar energy are cheap, then they are also nasty,’ claims the author, Professor Stephen Wilson, who is from the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering at the University of Queensland. Fossil fuels and nuclear energy are so much nicer, apparently.
‘Contrary to public opinion, the more wind and solar power that is added to a system, the more expensive it becomes to deliver as a service.’ And so it continues.
Professor Wilson recently spoke at a forum organised by the Centre for Independent Studies, which is in turn affiliated with the US-based Atlas Network, an organisation with close ties to the tobacco industry, as well as coal and gas producers.
For Tony Abbott, up on the IPA podium, it was a case of back to the future, as he lamented Australia’s lost chance under Labor to be a coal, gas and uranium ‘superpower’, even as vast quantities of these substances continue to be dug up.
‘I suppose I’m one of the very few national leaders who have been elected to office promising to end the emissions obsession which has dominated energy policy for the last two decades,’ said Mr Abbott. At least he was honest about negativity being at the core of his political ambition.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning film-maker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
Long ago, he did work experience in Parliament House with Mungo MacCallum.
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