Climate policy is like sacrifices to gods - Abbott
BRITAIN: Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has told British climate change sceptics that a ‘‘gradual lift in global temperatures’’ may be beneficial, and has likened climate scientists to the ‘‘thought police’’.
Yesterday in London, Abbott told the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s annual lecture that extreme weather events were not getting worse but did more damage because there is ‘‘ more to destroy’’.
‘‘Beware the pronouncement, ‘the science is settled’,’’ Abbott said, according to a speech posted on the think tank’s website.
‘‘It’s the spirit of the Inquisition, the thought police down the ages.’’
In the wide-ranging speech, in which the former prime minister warned against waning Western moral supremacy and Christian values, Abbott warned against what he said was the economic harm of climate change policies.
‘‘Environmentalism has managed to combine a postsocialist instinct for big government with a post-Christian nostalgia for making sacrifices in a good cause,’’ he said. ‘‘Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods.’’
The foundation was established by climate sceptic Nigel Lawson, who was a minister in former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.
Abbott also touched on Australian politics, saying the Liberal Party lost seats in the 2016 federal election because it had not responded to Labor’s 50 per cent renewable energy target promise.
Abbott’s speech comes as the Turnbull government appears to be abandoning a clean energy target, one of Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s recommendations.
Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg told an energy summit yesterday the government was considering its new policy against a backdrop of the rapidly falling costs of renewable energy and power storage, greater efficiencies in thermal generation, and the need for sufficient dispatchable power.
In 2013, former Australian prime minister John Howard told the foundation’s annual lecture that an international agreement on emissions would never be reached, and that Abbott’s own election victory was in part a backlash against ‘‘overzealous action’’ on global warming. - AAP