Culture

Tony Abbott’s Chief Business Adviser Thinks Global Warming Is A UN Conspiracy To Start “A New World Order”

WAKE UP, SHEEPLE.

by Meg Watson  8 May 2015

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By now, Australia’s stance on climate change is no big secret. Last year when the world’s major economies were off making major commitments to cut down on carbon emissions and boost up renewables, our Prime Minister was off rambling about the Very Important Medicare co-payment scheme. Then, when President Obama up and shirtfronted him over the whole business, Tony “climate change is crap” Abbott was suddenly taking the issue “very seriously”.

Since then, that’s translated into a clusterfuck of a renewable energy target which The Project’s Waleed Aly destroyed as “wilful disregard for the future of this nation by the people we’ve elected to lead us,” a narrow victory over Saudi Arabia on the Climate Change Performance Index and the PM getting a serious scolding from the UN.

Go team!

In the midst of all this, Tone has generally taken the same hesitant strategy you took in Year 9 science: smile, keep your mouth shut while hoping you cruise into a solid C. But, his chief business adviser Maurice Newman has a different tactic in mind: flip the fucking desk, accuse the teacher of being a witch and burn the classroom to the ground.

In an op-ed published today in The Australian, Newman — the chairman of the PM’s Business Advisory Council — has essentially declared the link between human CO2 emissions and global warming a load of bullshit, suggested climate change is just a crackpot doomsday theory, then accused the UN of using it as a tool in their ongoing quest to topple capitalism/democracy/the world as we know it.

“This is not about facts or logic,” he said, with almost no self-awareness. “It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN. It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.”

WAKE UP, SHEEPLE.

After a list of a few climate scientist’s incorrect predictions which are familiar fodder on most climate sceptic blogs including but not limited to obamaisareptileking.tumblr.com, Newman asserts that the facts we’re presented about climate change are really just part of an attempt to create an “authoritarian world [where] there will be no room for debate or ­disagreement”.

He then takes particular objection to Christiana Figeueres, the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Change who is in Australia at right now telling everyone to quit mining coal. These are thoughts which are backed up be a recent Climate Council report that states 90 percent of Australia’s coal reserves need to be left in the ground if we’re ever going to stay true to our international commitments on global warming. But it’s a difficult thing to hear for a country that’s still incredibly reliant on the fossil fuel, a Prime Minister who thinks “coal will continue to fuel human progress,” and a top business adviser who doesn’t want those damn dirty commies at the UN to steal all our hard-earned jobs.

For those playing at home, this isn’t Newman’s first time at the rodeo. In an interview with The Australian in 2013, he claimed we were all “hostage to climate change madness” and accused the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of “exploiting the masses [to extract] more money”.

Last year, The Australian upgraded him to fully-fledged opinion pieces when he wrote ‘We’re Ill-Prepared If The Ice Man Cometh’. There, he argued that the world could actually be cooling and compared our attempts to stop climate change as “primitive civilisations offering up sacrifices to appease the gods”.

The next day The Guardian absolutely destroyed most of the claims made therein and suggested the increasingly likely notion Newman might have “written some clever computer code that first scrapes climate science denial blogs for conspiracy theories and common misrepresentations and then turns them into 950-words for The Australian.”

Then-acting Greens Leader Adam Bandt was of a similar opinion labelling his comments “almost deranged and an embarrassment to the government”. “Someone with these flat-earth views has no place helping set policy for twenty-first century Australia,” he said. “Tony Abbott needs to repudiate these views and dump Mr Newman from his business advisory council.”

Clearly that didn’t happen, though there are plenty of renewed calls for his dismissal rolling on Twitter. Now, Tone has a choice: listen to one of his key advisers and piss of the entire international community at the UN December climate change conference in Paris, or dump the ranting old man once and for all.

Either way, we can probably expect more of this: