The most vocal opponents of same sex marriage in the federal Liberal Party are Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz, Craig Kelly, Zed Seselja and Peter Dutton. In 2016 Buzzfeed named the ‘dirty dozen’ MPs with the worst record on climate science and policy.[1] Of the Liberal MPs still in parliament Buzzfeed named Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz, Craig Kelly, Zed Seselja and Peter Dutton.
Until he left the party Cory Bernardi was implacably opposed to same sex marriage and one of its most hardened climate science deniers. If we extend to the National Party, we find Barnaby Joyce and George Christensen are two of the strongest opponents of same sex marriage and two of the strongest critics of climate action.
You might think this seems natural, but it is a puzzle. Why do those who believe we must protect the family structure we inherited from our parents not also believe we must protect the planet we inherited from our parents? There’s no inherent reason why those who believe that same sex marriage is a threat to the stability and moral foundations of our society should also believe that scientists are deceiving us and reducing carbon emissions is a left-wing plot.
Opposing same sex marriage and climate action have not always gone together. Understanding why they now do helps us understand the nature of the climate change debate in Australia and how it might evolve. To get there we need to delve into the history of the climate debate and understand how a question of science and economics was turned into a question of political culture, like same sex marriage.
Denial of climate science and resistance to measures to reduce Australian emissions have been growing in the conservative parties since the late 1990s, and have accelerated in the last five years. It is this shift that, above all other forces, lies at the heart of the horrible mess of climate politics in this country.
The media narrative, now adopted in the public mind, is that the politicians have for years been ‘squabbling’ over what to do about climate change. If only they could stop playing political games then Australia could set an agreed policy course and provide the stability and predictability that industry needs to invest in long-lasting assets. This narrative is quite wrong. In truth, the impasse is the creation almost entirely of the conservative parties. The mess is not an accident due to the rise of adversarial politics or the 24-hour news cycle, but the outcome actively planned by certain forces.
The year 2009 was a pivotal one in the shift; it was the year Tony Abbott defeated Malcolm Turnbull for the leadership of the Liberal Party. It was in this year that opposition to climate action was decisively transformed from an industry lobbying campaign into a phenomenon of political culture and group identity.
In the United States, climate denialism grew directly out of the conservative counter-movement against environmentalism. That counter-movement had been present from the beginnings of modern environmentalism in the 1970s, but the counter-movement gained new focus and momentum after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. When the red scare, which had obsessed conservatism for four decades, evaporated, it was replaced by the green scare. In the 1990s leading conservative thinkers began to speak of protecting national sovereignty from global environmentalism. They were alarmed by its critique of progress and man’s domination of nature. And they resisted its calls for limits on corporate behaviour.
The rise of neoliberalism, with its emphasis on personal freedoms and small government, amplified the perceived threat from policies to protect the environment. It set out to delegitimise environmental concerns in order to fend off calls for more regulation of business and consumers.
The coffers of conservative and free market think tanks began to be filled with funds from fossil fuel interests, notably Exxon, and right-wing foundations such as the Scaife Foundation. According to an investigation by US sociologist Robert Brulle, ‘dark money’ pouring into denial organisations totalled $558 million between 2003 and 2010.[2] The campaign methods were borrowed from those used by the tobacco industry to debunk the link between smoking and cancer.[3] Some of the same organisations and personnel shifted from defending tobacco to defending fossil fuels.
The essential goal was set out in a secret memo written in 2000 by Republican strategist Frank Luntz. The goal was to manufacture doubt. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.[4] By identifying and promoting a handful of contrarian scientists, they set about creating an impression in the public mind that the scientists were still debating whether human-induced global warming was real.
At the same time, conservative activists and commentators began to argue that the scientists presenting the dangers of warming, in universities, government agencies and the IPCC, were motivated by political objectives rather than scientific ones. The effect was to transform climate change from an essentially scientific question built on demonstrable facts into a political one of opinion and ideology. When Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994 they began a campaign to discredit environmental science and policy.[5] They attempted to debunk peer-reviewed science by promoting the opinions of fringe scientists as an ‘alternative point of view’.
The American news media played into the hands of the deniers and obstructionists. Schooled in the norms of objectivity, according to which they should put ‘both sides of the argument’, they provided a platform for those fringe scientists to air their views and in the process gave them legitimacy as authorities on climate change, despite the fact that most had no relevant qualifications and no published research on climate change. The election of George W. Bush in 2000, and the growing number of Republicans in Congress opposed to climate action, meant that more federal resources and political capital were poured into the campaign to discredit climate science and climate scientists.
By the late 1990s, the counter-movement had had great success in mobilising conservative elites to turn against science and policy action, as sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright show.[6] But had it changed public perceptions? It took time, but the evidence from opinion polls is clear. In the late 1990s the difference in beliefs about global warming between Democrat and Republican voters was small. By 2010 a wide gulf had opened up. The question of global warming had been successfully polarised, split on partisan lines.[7]
The most potent expression of this shift was the Tea Party, the conservative movement that arose in 2009, a few months after president Obama took office. With crucial support from Murdoch’s Fox News and funding from the radically conservative billionaires, the Koch brothers, in its first months Tea Party activists said little about climate change. But it didn’t take long before global warming appeared in its toxic brew of hated causes promoted by the liberal elite. Within a couple of years, the Tea Party had taken over the Republican Party.
Imported to Australia
Industry-funded think tanks and right-wing organisations in Australia watched and learned from events in the United States. They set about importing the ideas, tactics and (probably) funds to shift the debate in Australia.
A well-organised and well-funded campaign manufacturing doubt about climate science, and highlighting the ‘ruinous’ impacts of greenhouse policies, was soon underway. It identified and promoted contrarian scientists who appear to the uninitiated to have credible alternative views. It created front groups (such as the Australian Environment Foundation) to confuse the public. It backed climate science denying politicians and punished conservatives who defended science. It exploited the media’s norm of providing ‘balance’ and worked on recruiting conservative editors, academics and commentators to the denialist cause. It created an entire blogosphere devoted to propagating misinformation and attacking those who defended climate science.
At the centre of the campaign in the 1990s and early 2000s stood Hugh Morgan, former boss of Western Mining, president of the Business Council of Australia and close confidant of John Howard. Despite his standing, Morgan was an extremist by any measure. When the Howard government’s environment minister Robert Hill commissioned three reports on the pros and cons of emissions trading, Morgan lambasted them as similar to Nazi propaganda. He described environmentalism as a ‘religious movement of the most primitive kind’ and attacked the Kyoto Protocol as a plot by European bureaucrats to centralise world power. He was the businessman Howard listened to more than any other.
Morgan’s key operative was a man named Ray Evans, who in the 1990s became the main link between the emerging denial industry in Australia and its American parent. Evans later said, ‘My role was to engage in the culture wars and provide him [Morgan] with feedback’.[8] He set up the Lavoisier Group of contrarians, formed on the belief that the world’s scientists were engaged in a giant conspiracy. It characterised the Kyoto Protocol as a tool to usher in a ‘new imperial order’ that could destroy Australia’s wealth.
The efforts of right-wing activists went hand in glove with the campaign waged by fossil fuel industries and their lobby groups, collected together in the self-described ‘greenhouse mafia’. In the 1990s and early 2000s it engaged in a brutal and highly effective operation to stop all moves to introduce effective legislation to cut emissions. The influence of the greenhouse mafia was revealed by Liberal staffer Guy Pearse in his doctoral dissertation and a Four Corners program based around it that went to air in February 2006.[9]
Perhaps the most persistent and effective merchants of doubt in Australia have been the Institute for Public Affairs, the right-wing Melbourne think tank partially funded by the mining and fossil fuels industries.[10] In the 1990s it was soliciting money from the tobacco companies to write tracts attacking the medical evidence linking smoking with cancer, but by the late 1990s had shifted its attention to fossil fuels and global warming. It took money from oil and coal companies, and later from Gina Rinehart.[11] As I documented in my 2007 book Scorcher (see note 8 below), people associated with the IPA travelled to the United States to learn from the experts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cooler Heads Coalition and the Heartland Institute.
The IPA has promoted every prominent contrarian in Australia and brought a stream of prominent deniers from abroad. Its staff turned out scores of opinion pieces criticising climate science and carbon reduction policies and became the main source for ‘the alternative viewpoint’ for journalists and radio producers. The IPA was the first organisation to begin the crusade against wind farms, including astroturfing (setting up fake citizens groups) and promoting quacks speaking about wind turbine syndrome.[13] The IPA’s executive director John Roskam would later brag about the IPA’s role.[14] According to some, he ‘has done more to fuel doubt about climate change than almost anyone in Australia’.[15]
The Australian
The campaign of denial would have been much less effective without the backing of the Murdoch press and especially the Australian newspaper. For two decades, and particularly from 2002 when Chris Mitchell took over as editor-in-chief, the broadsheet has campaigned relentlessly to debunk climate science and discredit climate scientists.
The Australian frames climate change as a manifestation of the wider culture war, characterising climate scientists as leftists with a political agenda. It has published hundreds of stories and opinion pieces aimed at undermining the credibility of climate science, attacking renewable energy and railing against any policy that would reduce Australia’s emissions.
Many of the Australian’s readers have had their understanding corrupted by this campaign. Many senior business people and policymakers are convinced that there are serious doubts about the main propositions of climate science, as I found at the Climate Change Authority when some members arrived asking if we would listen to ‘the other side’ of the argument.
The falsities and distortions spread by the Australian are so numerous it’s impossible to detail them short of a very fat book. For some years a blog titled The Australian’s War on Science kept track, but the author Tim Lambert ran out of steam in early 2013.[16] The journalist Graham Readfearn has periodically exposed the distortions committed by his former employer News Ltd.
Robert Manne devoted part of his 2011 Quarterly Essay, ‘Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation’, to the newspaper’s war on science and its unique fondness for character assassination. The paper has described those calling for action on the scientific warnings ‘greenhouse hysterics’, ‘prophets of doom’, ‘deep-green Luddites, ‘the hessian-bag brigade, ‘zealots’ and much more. The opinion pages were turned over to every denialist you can think of, from the cleverer ones such as Bjorn Lomborg to the lunatics such as Lord Monckton.
The drumbeat of anti-science and hatred of renewable energy continue. Picking, randomly, the Saturday edition of 12 August last we find the paper’s stable of right-wing commentators in full flight.[17]
- Chris Kenny rages against renewables as ‘all pain for indiscernible gain’ and insists that Prime Minister Turnbull must take a new, rational direction
- Judith Sloan writes that we should (like Trump) withdraw from the Paris Agreement, ditch the renewable energy target and build coal-fired power plants. What she calls ‘sneaky modellers’ got away with ‘laughable predictions’ that pulled the wool over Tony Abbott’s eyes when he decided to keep the emission reduction target
- Henry Ergas argues, if that’s the right word, we must forget about cutting Australia’s emissions and simply buy emission credits from overseas. If we don’t then the ALP’s energy policy will cause the ‘collapse’ of our energy system
- Even Stephen Romei, the paper’s book review editor, writes in a review of Al Gore’s new film that he doesn’t know what’s right or wrong about climate science. Maybe he’s equally non-committal about the truth or otherwise of the benefits of vaccination or whether smoking causes cancer.
The dominant news issue in that edition of the paper was same sex marriage.
The ABC’s balance of bias
The national broadcaster is not innocent in the sorry saga of selling doubt.[20] In 2010 Australia received a visit from Viscount Lord Monckton, a charlatan and conspiracy theorist. Among his many infractions, he has claimed to have found a cure for AIDS, lied about his qualifications, compared Ross Garnaut to Adolf Hitler and officially launched the Rise up Australia Party whose leader Danny Nalliah said that the 2009 Victorian bushfires that killed 173 people were God’s punishment for abortion.[21]
The ABC gave Monckton’s views on climate science massive coverage. Crikey estimated that the ABC gave him 161 mentions, compared to the nine mentions it gave to the world-renowned NASA climate scientist James Hanson when he visited a few weeks later.
The ABC is quite rightly required to provide a balance of competing views. It should, for example, give more-or-less equal time to supporters and opponents of same sex marriage. But when the scientific facts overwhelmingly support one side and disprove the other, aiming for balance is in effect being biased. It misleads the public by giving the impression that there is serious scientific disagreement when there isn’t one. When ‘one side’ of an argument is backed by a large body of peer-reviewed research, tested and tested again by hundreds of top scientists, while the ‘other side’ is argued by people who do no research, are not recognised by the profession and cannot get their opinion published in scientific journals, giving the ‘other side’ equal time is stepping into the trap set by the deniers. It creates a false impression that there is doubt and a genuine debate.
The ABC would not present the ‘two sides’ of the vaccination debate or the two sides of the smoking and cancer debate, so why would it tell us there are two sides to the climate debate? Why does it manufacture doubt, just as the denial lobby planned? The answer is that it had come under tremendous pressure from conservatives and its senior executives capitulated, sacrificing editorial standards to appease the right. Other major news outlets recognised how deniers were exploiting their commitment to be balanced and had stopped giving space to deniers.
There are many other instances of the ABC playing into the hands of the deniers. Senior managers at the ABC continue to appease climate science denial, for example, by giving extraordinary access to its airways to ideologues from the Institute for Public Affairs.[22] I don’t have space to elaborate here. I would note, however, that between 2001 and 2008 the opinion editor at the Australian was Tom Switzer, from which position he published scores of articles from deniers with zero credibility to opine on climate science and whose views would not be published in any other major news outlet. He was a crucial player in the spread of climate science denial in Australia and its rise within the conservative parties.
Switzer is now a presenter on ABC Radio National, where his anti-science views shine through a veneer of impartiality. Other presenters also inject denialism into their programs or invite unqualified people to build the perception that scientists are divided. Ian ‘Macca’ McNamara, the voice of the hugely popular Sunday morning program Australia All Over, is a case in point.[23]
From lobbying to culture war
In the United States, despite the industry denial campaign, the year 2007 seemed to mark a high point for the possibility of change. Much of corporate America had shifted to a position of accepting that it would have to change, Al Gore’s film and Nobel Prize were a landmark and, despite the partisan divide, public opinion overall seemed fairly firmly in favour of action.
Yet the tide was about to turn in 2007. In the words of political scientists Deborah Lynn Guber and Christopher Bosso, ‘two short years later, the pendulum had swung back with stunning speed and force’.[24] The election of Barack Obama saw climate change politics get mixed up in the perennial politics of race. The failure of the Copenhagen conference in December 2009, preceded by the hugely successful scam known as ‘Climategate’, was a godsend for deniers.
The striking escalation of the partisan polarisation on climate change in the United States in this period came about in large measure because powerful forces successfully channelled the ‘generalized rage in the spring and summer of 2009’ expressed in the Tea Party into opposing climate policies and climate science.[25] As a result, ‘Tea Party activism elevated climate change to the status of a litmus test of cultural politics in the US, up there with abortion, guns, god, gays, immigration and taxes’.[26]
With the patronage of Fox News and the money of the Koch brothers, the Tea Party movement took off. So powerful has its influence been on conservative politics that in early 2012 all six Republican presidential nominees had repudiated their previous support for carbon abatement measures and rejected the science of climate change. As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney was one of the most vigorous advocates of emission reductions, but when he was running for the nomination he renounced climate science. In 2008 even Sarah Palin had expressed concern about global warming and called for a cap-and-trade system.
In 2010 I wrote of the United States, ‘In an era of intense ideological division, rejection of global warming had for some Americans become a means of consolidating and signalling their cultural identity, in the way that beliefs about patriotism, welfare and musical tastes do.’[27] This is the essential point to grasp if we are to understand climate politics in Australia. Opposition to climate science and climate policy is no longer driven by an industry-funded lobbying campaign. Although funds from a handful of fossil fuel corporations and rich people associated with the mining industry still flow into denialist think tanks, most Australian corporations and their lobby groups now accept climate science and the need for business to adapt to the emerging low-emissions world. This is true even of those companies that were the bedrock of the greenhouse mafia.
Opposing global warming has become deeply entrenched in the culture war being fought by hardline conservatives against the social transformation brought by the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This war has divided the Liberal Party.
The cultural heart of conservative opposition is crystal clear in the arguments of one the most prominent Australian deniers, Cardinal George Pell. In a 2005 speech, Pell lamented the influence of ‘anti-human’ climate change ‘zealots’. They are ‘religionless and spiritually rootless’ and pathologically attracted to mythology. In 2006 he went further: ‘In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.’[28]
I think this dread of environmentalism as the new paganism goes to the core of the second phase of denialism. Pell was Tony Abbott’s spiritual adviser and both were acolytes of the revered Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria. As young men they absorbed his apocalyptic vision of the life-and-death battle between good and evil. For Santamaria, the Devil walked on Earth cloaked in the ideas of communism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Devil returned dressed in green.[29] While climate campaigners are saving the Earth, conservatives such as Abbott and Pell are saving civilisation.
The events of 2009
How does all this help us understand what happened in 2009, when on 1 December Tony Abbott defeated Malcolm Turnbull in a ballot for leadership of the federal Liberal Party? As I have said, the denial of climate science and resistance to adequate measures to reduce Australian emissions had been growing in the Liberal and National parties since the late 1990s.
Cultural politics in Australia—the backlash against the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s—has followed that of the United States, although with important differences. On guns and abortion, bipartisanship largely rules, and god plays only a minor role in politics here. Gay rights and attitudes to race, now transferred to Islam, are powerful cultural litmus tests, as are arguments about the ‘nanny state’ and taxes. But for conservatives, the test that makes the litmus paper turn the angriest shade of red is global warming.
Now we can understand why the most vocal critics of climate science and policies to reduce carbon emissions are also the most vocal opponents of same sex marriage. It’s identity politics. Both go against the grain of their understanding of who they are in the public realm. In the years leading in to 2009, a grassroots campaign within the Liberal Party had seen the spread of climate science denial in the party branches, fostered by hardliners such as Nick Minchin. Paul Kelly, the Australian’s editor-at large, put it like this: ‘There was a sceptical cultural backlash from conservative voters suspicious about alarmist edicts from the scientific and political establishment and hostile to moralistic lectures demanding sacrifice now to save future generations from catastrophe.’[30] (Kelly can express this viewpoint so eloquently because he shares it.)
I never thought we would see it in this country, but it was not long before state conferences were passing resolutions calling for the teaching of climate science to be banned in schools. It’s necessary, a delegate would tell the 2012 conference of the Queensland LNP, so climate science cannot ‘poison the hearts and minds of our children’.[31] (The resolutions continue, with a number put to the annual conference of the NSW Liberal Party in 2016.)[32]
Yet until 2009 the forces of climate denialism were swimming against the tide of public opinion. Remember that John Howard went into the 2007 election promising to introduce an emissions trading system. Now, even Turnbull says he is opposed to one. Although the Howard government had resisted all serious measures to reduce Australia’s emissions, and had repudiated our commitments under the Kyoto protocol, it took public support for climate action as an electoral reality rather than, as it has become for the hardliners, an obstacle to be overcome in an ideological war.
In the Howard years, and more so since his defeat in the 2007 election, a growing proportion of new MPs entering parliament have been put there by the hard right of the Liberal Party.[33] The leader, Malcolm Turnbull, was famous for being a supporter of strong action, so a clash seemed inevitable. The leadership battle between Abbott and Turnbull revolved above all around climate change policy because Abbott became the personification among grassroots conservatives of those raging against the ‘cultural left’.
Abbott was looking for a cause. He knew he would get no firm traction in his opposition to abortion, gay rights and women’s rights. He had not been prominent in the denialist campaign but they knew he was one of them. Three months before the leadership contest, he told a Liberal Party function in regional Victoria that the idea of human-caused climate change was ‘crap’, although in public he accepted the Howard position of grudging acknowledgement of climate science and the need for some kind of response.
Seen as a fanatic, Abbott was considered unelectable as Liberal leader because he was unelectable as prime minister. But within the Liberal Party (and the National Party) Turnbull’s strong support for effective climate policy had stirred roiling dissent, especially as he was inclined to back the Labor Party’s proposal for an emissions trading system. In the days leading up to the leadership vote, Liberal MPs were subjected to a blizzard of emails, faxes and phone calls from party members implacably opposed to Turnbull’s stance on climate change. It was a grassroots intervention of unprecedented intensity and it shook many conservatives.
The angry torrent from the grassroots had been organised by a network of think tanks, denialist groups, party activists and internet warriors. Journalists Ben Cubby and Antony Lawes wrote: ‘The network was instrumental in nurturing the deluge of climate sceptic emails that helped to convince Liberal MPs to dump Malcolm Turnbull …’[34] For some waverers, the pressure was decisive.
It’s a law of politics that an energised and zealous minority can prevail over a majority less passionate about its position. And the minority in the conservative parties was growing. For conservatives in the Liberal Party uneasy with Malcolm Turnbull’s kind of liberalism, fighting him over climate change became the outlet they needed. It was only in the feverish weeks leading up to the challenge that Abbott, influenced by Minchin and the grassroots surge, flipped from equivocal support for climate change action to full-on denial, albeit behind the flimsiest of veils. It was the cudgels of climate change that Abbott took up to give public legitimacy to his true conservative mission.
Before the leadership spill, a secret party room ballot on support for an ETS had split 29 for and 54 against. It was a shock. Still, when the day arrived for the party room vote no-one, including the challenger himself, expected Abbott to win. On the first ballot only 35 out of 84 backed him. But when Joe Hockey was eliminated in the ensuing ballot Abbott defeated Turnbull by one vote (42 to 41).
Abbott unchained
Now as leader of the opposition, Abbott launched a ferocious and highly effective campaign focussed almost exclusively on climate change. He evoked fears of a giant new tax on everything and at a rally he stood in front of a banner reading ‘Ju-Liar Bob Brown’s Bitch’. The sign captured perfectly three hatreds of the cultural warriors—of carbon policy, of the Greens and of a woman as prime minister. (Abbott refused to repudiate the banner for the same reason Donald Trump would not repudiate the white supremacists of Charlottesville.) Aided by turmoil in the Labor government centred on climate policy and Kevin Rudd’s deep character flaws, the campaign took Tony Abbott into the Lodge.
It was the culmination of a cultural-political force that had swept through the conservative political parties. Climate science had been turned into a toxic battleground, one that has paralysed and destroyed several governments. (Turnbull could replace the desperately unpopular Abbott as prime minister only by promising never to introduce a carbon price.) It will change only when the forces of denial, powered by the wider cultural backlash, are decisively defeated in the Liberal Party. That can happen only if the moderates win back the party in the state branches, or if the federal party is marginalised electorally for a decade or more.
Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and public intellectual. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.
Notes
[1] See <https://www.buzzfeed.com/aliceworkman/dirty-dozen?utm_term=.mhEZ23qEd#.tgMgRYWyp>.
[2] Robert Brulle, ‘Institutionalizing delay: Foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations’, Climatic Change, DOI 10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7, 21 December 2013.
[3] The links have been thoroughly documented by, among others, James Hoggan in Climate Cover-Up (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in Merchants of Doubt (2010) and Clive Hamilton in Requiem for a Species (2010).
[4] See <http://www.motherjones.com/files/LuntzResearch_environment.pdf>.
[5] Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, ‘The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public’s Views of Global Warming, 2001–2010, Sociological Quarterly, no. 52 (2011), pp. 155–94.
[6] See Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright, ‘Challenging Climate Change: The Denial Countermovement’, in Riley Dunlap and Robert Brulle (eds), Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives, Oxford University Press, New York, 2015, pp. 300–32.
[7] Riley Dunlap, Aaron McCright and Jerrod Yarosh, ‘The Political Divide on Climate Change’, Environment, vol.58, no. 5 (2016), p. 5.
[8] Quoted in Clive Hamilton, Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2007, p. 136.
[9] It led to a book: Guy Pearse, High and Dry, Penguin, Melbourne, 2007.
[10] See Hamilton, Scorcher; also <http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/the-benefit-of-the-doubt-20100507-ujof.html>.
[11] Clive Hamilton, ‘The shadowy world of IPA finances’, ABC News online, 24 February 2012.
[13] Ben Cubby and Josephine Tovey, ‘Wind farm opponents “aided and abetted” by climate sceptic groups’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 2011.
[14] See <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-11-19/the_origin_of_sceptics/41292?pfmredir=sm>.
[15] See <http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/the-benefit-of-the-doubt-20100507-ujof.html>.
[16] See <http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/category/the_war_on_science/>.
[17] Weekend Australian, 12–13 August 2017.
[20] Clive Hamilton, ‘Appeasing climate deniers at the ABC’, Overland, Spring 2010.
[21] Clive Hamilton, ‘Viscount Monckton of Brenchley’s over-egged CV’, Crikey, 12 January 2010; see also <http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/abortion-to-blame-for-fires-pastor/2009/02/10/1234028017844.html>.
[22] See <https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/abc-drums-up-appearances-for-the-ipa,4315>.
[23] See Clive Hamilton, ‘The Dirty Dozen: Australia’s biggest climate foes, part 1’, Crikey, 15 April 2014.
[24] Quoted by Dunlap, McCright and Yarosh, ‘Political Divide on Climate Change’, p. 5.
[25] Jane Mayer quoted by Dunlap, McCright and Yarosh, ‘The Political Divide on Climate Change’, p. 6.
[26] David L. Levy, ‘It’s the real thing’, ClimateInc, 8 September 2010.
[27] Hamilton, Requiem for a Species, p. 108.
[28] See <http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/pell-challenges-islam–o-ye-of-little-tolerant-faith/2006/05/04/1146335872951.html>.
[29] See the interesting blog post by Tony Goodfellow concerning Ballarat, Pell’s home town: <https://thegoodfellow.net/2016/06/18/climate-denial-in-ballarat-santamaria-pell-connor-court-and-madigan/>.
[30] Paul Kelly, Triumph and Demise, MUP, Melbourne, 2014, p. 23. Note Kelly’s phrase ‘the scientific and political establishment’, thrown out as if scientists were, like politicians, members of an exclusive club motivated to protect their own self-centred interests.
[31] Rosanne Barrett, ‘No climate change in school: LNP’, Weekend Australian, 14–15 July 2012.
[32] See <http://www.climate.conscious.com.au/docs/20160412/State_Council_Motions_March_2016.pdf>.
[33] Pearse, High and Dry, p. 136. The evidence for post-2007 is anecdotal. It may be that the proportion of deniers has not grown but their voices have grown louder, and their influence is greater.
[34] See <http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/the-benefit-of-the-doubt-20100507-ujof.html>.
