The fossil fuel lobby has secretly donated millions of dollars to the Liberal Party in an attempt to prevent climate change action and hoodwink voters. Sandi Keane and Barry Everingham report.
FUNNY THING about the current crop of climate change sceptics at the recent anti carbon tax rally: when their patron saint John Howard took his ETS scheme to the 2007 election, there was no evidence of trailer-trash red neck protesters to his plan. In fact, dear reader, if you voted Greens, ALP or the Coalition in 2007, you voted for a price on carbon!
Believe it or not, had John Howard won the 2007 election, we’d have an ETS now!
It seems it was OK to have a price on carbon when Howard was more or less forced to do it, but along comes Tony Abbott — you know, the one who professes to be the love child of Howard and Bronwyn Bishop (and if that’s true there has he be a test tube waiting for him in some medical museum for freaks).
Now, the Opposition Leader is either listening to the lunar right or he’s being smart enough to seize the chance to fatten his campaign coffers.
The big polluters have been paying the Liberals to wage war on climate change for decades.
Strong words?
Well, they aren’t mine; they belong to the former Liberal Party spin doctor turned whistle-blower, Dr Guy Pearse.
In his brilliantly documented exposé on the hijacking of the Liberal’s climate action agenda – High & Dry – he lays out in forensic detail the complicated money trail concocted to deceive the Australian public.
Now, after checking the Australian Electoral Commission Register, there was no evidence of secret donations because the bulk of them went through clandestine trusts which are essentially “fronts” for the Liberal Party. The main front is the Cormack Foundation but the Liberals also funnel funds from secret donors through the Greenfields Foundation and the Free Enterprise Foundation.
In Clive Hamilton’s Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change, he claims almost $13 million was secretly donated to the Liberal Party before the 2007 election by the fossil fuel lobby.
Now the cynicism of the lobby is breathtaking — they also contributed smaller amounts openly so that no-one would smell a rat. According to Pearse, the paper trails are such that only a very determined forensic investigate journalist could uncover the truth. Of course, Guy Pearse is such a journalist.
Now John Howard, always careless with the truth, reached very low depths even for him and his political love child is well and truly cast in his Dad’s mould.
There’s no debate any longer in the Euro-zone.
There hasn’t been for years since the science was settled.
In conservative-governed UK, Germany and France, conservative voters are at one with the rest of the population—they want to save the planet from runaway global warming.
But, sad to say, dinosaurs still roam free in once proud Liberal party land.
By far the largest majority of climate sceptics in Australia are Coalition voters. Nielson’s latest poll shows 78% of voters are against the price on carbon.
But wait—those people voted for one in 2007!
Cynics may well see this result as purely political “let’s stick up Gillard”!
Or, could it be that the credulous and uninformed are being preyed upon today using the same chicanery big tobacco employed to such good effect in the ‘90’s; back then the credo was the same as today: deny the science, or failing that, delay action!
So we see the big polluters following the sordid history of big tobacco—creating doubt to delay regulation and extend by decades their market share.
It’s all there.
The same strategies, tactics and junk science — even the same scientists.
Fred Singer, now in his 90’s was their champion! Perverted the truth and protected the profits of big tobacco just as he does today for the big polluters.
Come to think of it, non-representative scientists favoured by Tony Abbott such as Ian Plimer and Bob Carter are also old men who have failed to make it on the academic stage, succumbing to a last ditch chance for fame and added comfort in their old age. Plimer is on the boards of three mining companies and is reputed to earn $350,000 annually as a director, which is a huge amount more than he collects as a mining geologist in a South Australian university.
The fossil fuel lobby in Australia and the USA doesn’t attempt to convince the well informed: they target the credulous.
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