Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has joined a UK climate think tank to inject a “note of realism into the climate debate.”
The London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), founded in 2009 by former UK conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, says it aims to have a less “hysterical” and “emotional” debate on the subject.
“People are naturally concerned about the environment and want to see policies that enhance human wellbeing and protect the environment; policies that don’t hurt, but help,” the foundation’s mission statement reads.
GWPF chair Jerome Booth said Abbott would bring a global perspective and policy insight to the board of trustees.
“He will further assist our objectives and help our efforts to foster a culture of debate, respect and scrutiny in policy areas that are currently dominated by intolerance, high emotions, moral reasoning and confusion,” Booth said.
Abbott noted that he was “pleased to be joining GWPF because it’s consistently injected a note of realism into the climate debate.”
“All of us want to save the only planet we have, but this should not be by means which impoverish poorer people in richer countries and hold poorer countries back,” the former PM said.
Abbott added that in countries like Australia, the impact of climate policy is “to make electricity less affordable and less reliable rather than perceptibly to cool the planet.”
A Conservative Leader
Abbott led the centre-right Coalition to a landslide election victory over centre-left Labor in 2013. He remained Australia’s leader until 2015, when he was ousted by Malcolm Turnbull in a leadership spill in 2015.“Even if reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely-better-than-futile; because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s,” he said.
“There’s the evidence that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide—which is a plant food, after all—are actually greening the planet and helping to lift agricultural yields. In most countries, far more people die in cold snaps than in heatwaves, so a gradual lift in global temperatures, especially if it’s accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change, might even be beneficial.”
The former PM also told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Sydney in 2019: “I don’t like the climate cult. I don’t like the virus hysteria. I can’t understand the gender fluidity push. I don’t like magic pudding economics, and I particularly dislike the cultural self-loathing.”
Independent Zali Steggall took Abbott’s federal seat of Warringah—spanning Sydney’s northern beaches—in 2019, campaigning widely on action for more government policy on climate action.
Fellow Australians who advise the GWPF include retired meteorologist William Kininmonth and Garth Paltridge, emeritus professor at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania.
“Policies to ‘stop climate change’ are based on climate models that completely failed to predict the lack of warming for the past two decades. Observational data show clearly that the predictions of unacceptable warming caused by more carbon dioxide are wrong. Economic discount rates aside, policies designed to save the planet from more carbon dioxide are based on failed computer models,” they said.
“Human emissions of carbon dioxide, a transparent, odourless, non-toxic gas, essential for plant growth and contained at about 40,000 parts per million (ppm) in our own breaths. Carbon dioxide has been mercilessly demonized as ‘carbon pollution’, when in fact it is a benefit to the planet.”
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