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London: Former prime minister Tony Abbott has told a right-wing conference he had never believed in human-driven climate change as he vowed the “climate cult” would one day be defeated.
Abbott was speaking at the launch of the Institute of Public Affairs’ new paper Energy Security is National Security, held on the sidelines of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott.Credit: James Brickwood
He revealed that when he had professed to support cutting carbon emissions as prime minister and leader of the Coalition, he had always added a disclaimer that it should not cost jobs or send dirtier forms of energy generation to countries that were not as serious about reducing greenhouse gases.
“And when I was feeling particularly bold, I would add things like this, I would say, ‘you know, 10,000 years or so back we had an Ice Age, that was rather dramatic climate change, but presumably that had nothing to do with mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions’,” Abbott said.
Abbott, who was appointed to the board of Fox Corporation in late September as soon as Lachlan Murdoch took over from his father Rupert Murdoch as sole chairman, said he would point to the Medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age as further examples that climate had “nothing to do with mankind’s emissions”.
“So I think it is worth stating that the anthropogenic global warming thesis, at least in its more extreme forms, is both ahistorical and utterly implausible. And I think that needs to be repeated a little more,” he said.
According to NASA, 97 per cent of the world’s scientists agree that humans are causing both global warming and climate change.
“Scientific evidence continues to show that human activities, primarily the human burning of fossil fuels, have warmed Earth’s surface and its ocean basins, which in turn have continued to impact Earth’s climate,” an article on NASA’s website reads. “This is based on over a century of scientific evidence forming the structural backbone of today’s civilisation.”
Average global temperatures have increased as the amount of carbon dioxide has increased, as long predicted by climate scientists.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report found human activities are definitively responsible for all global warming since 1850.
Abbott was applauded by supporters in the room when he said: “The climate cult will inevitably be discredited, I just hope we don’t have to endure an energy catastrophe before that happens.”
He said the current government’s policy of reaching 82 per cent renewables by 2030 “was not just utterly irrational” but “actually impossible”.
Abbott said that when given the choice of cutting emissions or protecting the cost of living for voters, he had always chosen the latter.
He said Australian voters were not given this choice at the last election because both sides had signed up to net zero by 2050.
Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
In response to Abbott’s comments, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said: “Tony Abbott and his ilk are responsible for a decade of catastrophic climate policy.
“That serious figures in the LNP, current and former, engage in this blatant climate change denial in 2023 tells us why the LNP is unfit to govern and will continue to be whilst destructive figures like Dutton and Abbott continue to call the shots.”
Campaigns to reach net zero targets have been dialled down by some governments, including in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in September announced a series of U-turns on key targets to tackle climate change.
While Sunak said he was still “absolutely unequivocal” about reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, he wanted to take a “more pragmatic, proportionate and realistic approach”.
Sunak said governments “of all stripes” had not been “honest with the public” about the costs of net zero and delayed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035.
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