The spurious "97% consensus" claim now needs legal protection from being disproven

Anthony Watts has apparently obtained more of the data on which John Cook based his 97% claim and was set to publish an article showing just how disreputable the Cook claim is.

But the university where Cook works has now issued Watts with a threatening legal letter that forbids him from discussing Cook's work  -- on the ground that Cook's work is copyrighted!

How Fascist can you get!  A claim that cannot be discussed!  It tells us most vividly how indefensible the claim is.

Anthony gives the gruesome details here





Science as McCarthyism

Another scientist gets blackballed for his skepticism about global warming.

On Monday, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson took a tilt at climate skeptics. “The assumption that the vast majority in a scientific field is engaged in fraud or corruption is frankly conspiratorial,” Gerson wrote. As a non-scientist, he decided that the answer to the question of whether humans had warmed the planet was to trust scientists.

The article’s timing was unfortunate. Three weeks ago, Lennart Bengtsson, a leading Swedish meteorologist approaching his 80s, announced that he was joining the avowedly skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank. In an interview with Spiegel Online, Bengtsson spoke of the need for climate-model predictions to be validated against observations. “Since the end of the 20th century, the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show,” he said.

Hadn’t the IPCC covered this in its recent report? “Yes,” Bengtsson replied:

"the scientific report does this but, at least in my view, not critically enough. It does not bring up the large difference between observational results and model simulations. I have full respect for the scientific work behind the IPCC reports but I do not appreciate the need for consensus. It is important, and I will say essential, that society and the political community is also made aware of areas where consensus does not exist."

One of the most telling features of climate science is just how few climate scientists changed their minds as the evidence changed. The pause in global temperature in the last 15 years or so has been unexpected. Now we know why: Yesterday, Bengtsson dropped a bombshell. He was resigning from the think tank. In his resignation letter, Bengtsson wrote:

"I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. . . . Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy."

Especially significant was a tweet from Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute, who for many years worked alongside James Hansen. “Groups perceived to be acting in bad faith should not be surprised that they are toxic within the science community,” Schmidt tweeted. “Changing that requires that they not act in bad faith and not be seen to be acting in bad faith.”

Evidently the right to practice and discuss climate science should be subject to a faith test. It is an extraordinarily revealing development. Fears about unbelievers’ polluting the discourse, as some academics put it, illustrate the weakness of climate science: The evidence for harmful anthropogenic global warming is not strong enough to stand up for itself.

Inadvertently Schmidt’s tweet demonstrates how far climate science has crossed the boundary deep into pseudo-science. Karl Popper observed of the trio of pseudo-sciences prevalent in 1920s Vienna that their followers could explain why non-believers rejected their manifest truths. For Marxists, it was because of their class interests. For subscribers to Freudian psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler’s psychology, non-belief was evidence of unanalyzed repressions crying out for treatment. So it is with climate science. Only the pure of heart should be allowed an opinion on it.

Science regresses if it becomes intolerant of criticism. At the beginning of her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England spoke words of tolerance in an age of religious strife, declaring that she had no intention of making windows into men’s souls. Unlike religion, science is not a matter of the heart or of belief. It exists only in what can be demonstrated. In their persecution of an aged colleague who stepped out of line and their call for scientists to be subject to a faith test, 21st-century climate scientists have shown less tolerance than a 16th-century monarch.

There is something rotten in the state of climate science.

SOURCE





More Green/Left Fascism

MSNBC’s Hayes: Some Conservative Beliefs Should Disqualify People From Public Office.  This is a discussion by democratically deficient people. Who should decide what beliefs are to be disqualifying? The answer of course: dictators

On Tuesday’s All In, host Chris Hayes and his guests tackled a chilling and politically loaded subject: which beliefs should disqualify someone from holding public office. Among other things, the group decided that global warming “denialism,” opposition to same-sex marriage, and opposition to a “robust” Voting Rights Act should put a politician outside the mainstream and ruin their chances of holding public office.

Hayes seemed excited that politicians might be branded with a figurative scarlet letter for holding beliefs that run counter to his own far-left vision. In fact, he claimed the act of disqualification based on certain beliefs is a “tool of progress,” not something that “constrains consensus.” The host gloated:

It’s a tool of progress when we say that certain things, like opposing marriage equality, are sort of, like, not the kinds of things that mainstream American politicians –

One of Hayes’ guests cut him off, but he didn’t need to finish that sentence. The point is clear – Hayes has stumbled upon a new way to squelch debate in this country and pave the way for liberal domination of American political thought.

The host was particularly gleeful over the growing acceptance of the theory that human beings are driving climate change. After playing clips of Sen. Marco Rubio expressing skepticism of global warming and then trying to clarify when pressed on the issue, Hayes smirked:


[T]he fascinating aspect of this to me is that it looked to me for the first time in a long time that denialism was looking like a thing that was a disqualifier or at least something to be defensive about in a way I haven't seen in a while.

One of Hayes’ guests, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, agreed:

And I think nowadays it is. I mean, this is an issue that’s – I mean, we’re all threatened by this. I mean, the planet is in danger. Something needs to be done. And I think if you’re just going to deny that this is even occurring, it means that you’re going to be blocking the policies that we need, and it should be a disqualifier.

Hayes even went so far as to call global warming skeptics "really cuckoo."

Regarding gay marriage, the host was also ready to declare the debate closed. He exulted that he has "never seen an issue go so quickly from a contentious, contested issue that’s at the center of our political debates to one in which opposition to it is quickly becoming taboo.”

But in many parts of the country, gay marriage still is a “contentious, contested issue.” Hayes only wishes it were a settled topic.

By the way, the host placed global warming skepticism and opposition to gay marriage in the same basket as 9/11 Trutherism. During his introduction to this discussion, Hayes mentioned that Van Jones, now a co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, was pressured into resigning from his job in the Obama White House because, among other things, his name appeared on a petition that suggested the George W. Bush administration may have knowingly allowed the 9/11 terrorist attacks to happen. The host failed to mention, of course, that MSNBC colleague Toure has a history of Truther-style statements.

That conspiracy theory is well outside of the mainstream, but it was what prompted Hayes to launch his discussion of other, more conservative beliefs that he wishes society would just laugh away.

Below is a transcript of the segment:

CHRIS HAYES: Van Jones says he never actually signed the 9/11 truther petition that prompted that spout of outrage, and he maintained from the start it did not reflect his actual views. But just that tiny little brush with trutherism was enough to get the guy drummed out of the White House. And all this got me thinking about what exactly should constitute a disqualifier when it comes to those who want to hold public office or even work in the government. Joining me now, Bob Herbert, distinguished senior fellow with Demos; Christina Bellantoni, editor-in-chief of Roll Call; and Richard Kim, executive editor of TheNation.com.

I am really interested in the boundaries of taboo and consensus and what are the kinds of things that are the kinds of things that politicians can argue about, and the kinds of things that kind of place them off the table. And  I thought it was interesting to see the Ernst campaign felt that that claim about WMD was an off-the-table kind of claim they had to then deny, which I found to be progress of a sort. Are there certain things you think, Bob, that should be in the kind of off-the-table category that aren't currently in the off-the-table category?

BOB HERBERT: Sure. I would start with if you don't have support for a robust Voting Rights Act for example. So if you're running for national office and you don't feel that qualified Americans ought to be guaranteed the right to vote, that should disqualify you.

HAYES: Just like Voting Rights Act as a matter of – Voting Rights Act or opposition to Voting Rights Act is off the table. But here’s the thing that's tricky about that, right, is that no one comes out. You're right. That is actually rhetorically where we are in American politics insofar as no one will come out and be like, I don't like the Voting Rights Act, unless, you know, Supreme Court justices. But, right, I think – don't you agree that if someone – no one would actually come out and say that.

[crosstalk]

HERBERT: – should have to come out and say it. I'm saying you need to be forthright in your support of a robust Voting Rights Act because you need to be forthright in your support of Americans' right to vote.

HAYES: And Rand Paul has come pretty close.

RICHARD KIM: With the Civil Rights Act, which is not the Voting Rights Act, but that package of civil rights legislation.

HAYES: And that infamous moment on Rachel’s show with the long, torturous, just train wreck of an interview in which he basically said, I'm not that into the public accommodation part of the Civil Rights Act, that was him flirting with precisely the line of the disqualifying.

***

JONATHAN KARL: Let me get this straight. You do not think that human activity, the production of CO2, has caused warming to our planet?

SEN. MARCO RUBIO: I don't believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.

UNIDENTIFIED: What information, reports, studies or otherwise are you relying on to inform and reach your conclusion that human activity is not to blame for climate change?

RUBIO: Well, again, I mean –  headlines notwithstanding, I’ve never disputed that the climate is changing, and I pointed out that climate, to some extent, is always changing. It’s never static.

HAYES: Nice try, Marco Rubio. I’m back with Bob Herbert, Christina Bellantoni, and Richard Kim. And the reason I want to play that, so Rubio – again, he stepped in it on that Jon Karl interview. I think he didn’t think it was going to become a headline. I mean, you can see his passive/aggressive note about headlines notwithstanding. And then today he tried to walk it back in a totally incoherent way. But the fascinating aspect of this to me is that it looked to me for the first time in a long time that denialism was looking like a thing that was a disqualifier or at least something to be defensive about in a way I haven't seen in a while.

HERBERT: And I think nowadays it is. I mean, this is an issue that’s – I mean, we’re all threatened by this. I mean, the planet is in danger. Something needs to be done. And I think if you’re just going to deny that this is even occurring, it means that you’re going to be blocking the policies that we need, and it should be a disqualifier.

HAYES: And the key here to me is, the conspiratorial thinking it requires to think that thousands of scientists across the globe are engaged in this massive hoax, which is basically what James Inhofe, who’s a sitting U.S. senator, believes, right? The conspiratorial thinking that it takes to believe that is really cuckoo. I mean, that is really out there.

KIM: Okay, I can't believe I'm going to take the other side on this. So obviously, I don't believe, you know, these views, and I think they’re sort of lunatic and really dangerous. On the other hand, large percentages of the American population believe that. And don't they have representation in that political process? And I also worry that if you have this circle of disqualified opinions, and you keep growing that circle, what that rewards is an incentive structure that depends on sort of an absolute certainty of emotion. Like a really kind of intense belief. And to keep feeding that, if the facts on the ground don't match, you invent a set of facts. And I think, actually, that is what has happened to the Republican Party. They’ve sort of produced this outrage machine.

HAYES: So you're just saying, like, against litmus tests as a broad –

KIM: I say let the democratic process play out, and people should vote these things down.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: On climate, as a specific thing. The candidate that appeals to the business community tends to be the candidate that’ll either win the nomination or win the general election. And so this is an area where you –

HAYES: In the Republican party, in particular.

BELLANTONI: In general, though, you have to be palpable to them to sit in the White House. And so with the business community shifting on this issue or on minimum wage issues or on some other labor issues, that's where you start to see the shifts. That guides the politician.

HAYES: But what you’re identifying, though, is precisely the nefarious ideological undercurrent of discussions about what's disqualifying. Because, I mean, that goes hand-in-glove with what Richard is saying. You’re saying the people that actually draw the lines around what’s disqualifying is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And like, frankly, that’s what’s going to decide if you're, like, a whacko.

BELLANTONI: And just watch with immigration reform. I mean, the conversation has completely changed since 2005-2006 when George Bush, people were angry at him in a certain segment of the population because he supported immigration reform. And now it is sort of a moderate Republican view.

HAYES: Or on marriage equality. I mean, that is a place where you really do see –   I have never seen an issue go so quickly from a contentious, contested issue that’s at the center of our political debates to one in which opposition to it is quickly becoming taboo.

HERBERT: Well, the truth is that you can only do this as a hypothetical exercise, and that’s a good example of why. I mean, there was a time when no one could get elected if they were in favor of gay marriage. Now in many elections it’s a disqualifier if you’re opposed to gay marriage.

HAYES: But that makes me hopeful about the power of this kind of – the force of this, as opposed to this being something that constrains consensus, it actually is this tool, right? It’s a tool of progress when we say that certain things, like opposing marriage equality, are sort of, like, not the kinds of things that mainstream American politicians –

KIM: But it's also a double-edged sword. So things like supporting a 90 percent tax rate, which was once policy in the United States –

HAYES: Right, that's a very good point.

KIM: – would be a completely disqualifying characteristic for many, many people in this country.

HAYES: If you came forward and said I am for a 90 percent top marginal tax rate, which of course was what it was after World War II and the Eisenhower administration before the first round of tax cuts, you would be – that would be the equivalent.

KIM: Exactly.

SOURCE





What's the Real 'Climate Change' Agenda?

A Perfect Storm for an End Run on Liberty

We’re nearing the hot season in the Northern Hemisphere and, predictably, that means the Left’s alarmist “global warming” rhetoric is heating up. Never mind that most weather forecasts beyond 72 hours are largely speculative; these purveyors of hot gas believe we should accept their inviolable 100-year forecast.

Ahead of this year’s midterm elections, amid the plethora of its domestic and foreign policy failures, the Democrat Party has chosen to make their “climate change” fear and fright campaign an electoral centerpiece. Their strategy is to rally the most liberal cadres of Al Gore’s cult of Gorons, whose religious zeal toward “global warming” is fanatical. Unfortunately, for the rest of America, most who occupy this Leftist constituency are no longer capable of distinguishing fact from fiction.

Though the climate alarmists of the 1970s were driven by rhetoric over the coming ice age, the current climate calamity is one of global warming. But the question about climate isn’t if the weather is varying but why it is varying.

And the answer to that question is far less complicated than the “climate change” agenda, which is not about the weather, but about a political strategy to subjugate free enterprise under statist regulation – de facto socialism, under the aegis of “saving us from ourselves.”

The climate is always changing relative to complex short- and long-term climate cycles, so “climate change” is a superbly safe political “cause célèbre” – sort of like “heads we win, tails you lose.” So, declarations like Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union warning – “The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact” – fall into the “keen sense of the obvious” category.

In April, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change released a synopsis of thousands of climate studies, which contradict the conventional “global warming assumptions.” According to the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon, “We are now at 17 years and eight months of no global warming.”

Not to be outdone by the NIPCC, however, the Obama administration released its own 800-page apocalyptic National Climate Assessment last week, with such erudite conclusions as, “[W]e know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now.”

I “know” with more than “increasing certainty” that every time I walk outside, I can detect climate change, and this ever-changing condition is better known as “weather.”

Despite the hot hype, Jason Furman, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, the week before Obama trotted out his climate assessment, had this to say about sluggish first quarter economic growth: “The first quarter of 2014 was marked by unusually severe winter weather.”

Global cooling? That’s right, economic stagnation is not the result of failed “economic recovery” policies but “unusually severe winter weather.”

Obama’s minister of propaganda, Jay Carney, followed with this explanation: “We had historically severe winter weather which temporarily lowered growth in the first quarter … in other words, a reduction of 1 to 1.5% in GDP as a result of what was historically severe weather, one of the coldest winters on record, the greatest number of snowstorms on record.”

After the White House climate assessment was released, Carney was challenged about the disparity between “historically severe winter weather” and global warming, and responded, “The impacts of climate change on weather are severe in both directions.”

Well there you go – climate change is the default explanation for hot and cold weather.

It was no small irony that last week, Obama chose to promote his administration’s “green agenda” with Walmart as a backdrop – ironic given that most of Walmart’s products are produced in China and other third-world nations, the biggest land, water and atmospheric polluters on the planet.

To that end, columnist Charles Krauthammer notes, “We have reduced our carbon dioxide emission since 1996 more than any other country in the world, and, yet, world emissions have risen. Why? We don’t control the other 96% of humanity. We can pass all the laws we want. We can stop all economic activity and take cold showers for the next 100 years, it will not change anything if India and China are opening a new coal plant every week.”

I would suggest to Charles that it’s called “global climate” because it is not “local climate,” even if China and India reduced their CO2 emissions it would not stop “climate change.”

Further, the administration’s report claims that “climate disruption” has resulted in a global temperature rise of 1.3 to 1.9 degrees since 1895 – and it is no coincidence that the report cherry-picked that starting date because 1890 is recognized as the end of the 300-year “Little Ice Age” global cooling period.

For the record, estimates of the minuscule temperature fluctuation over the last century, if correct, would explain why White House science adviser John Holdren has abandoned the term “global warming,” opting instead for the more ambiguous and all-encompassing phrase “global climate disruption.”

Fact is, we “disrupt” the global climate every time we exhale.

Such linguistic obfuscations would make the old Soviet Dezinformatsia Bureau proud! Of course, the Obama administration has mastered the art of the “BIG Lie” from the top down. (Think about it: Would you buy a used car from any of them?)

However, even the Left’s cherished United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that there “is limited evidence of changes in [weather] extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century.”

And, regarding the objectivity of all those erudite “climate change” scientists, columnist George Will observed, “There is a sociology of science. Scientists are not saints in white laboratory smocks. They have got interests like everybody else. If you want a tenure-track position in academia, don’t question the reigning orthodoxy on climate change. If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don’t question its orthodoxy. If you want to get along with your peers, conform to peer pressure. This is what’s happening.”

Krauthammer added, “All physicists were once convinced that space and time were fixed until Einstein, working in a patent office, wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not. I’m not impressed by numbers. I’m not impressed by consensus.”

As for those of us who can distinguish between fact, fiction and political endgames, and are most decidedly not among Obama’s legions of pantywaist bed-wetters, he unilaterally suspends the revered scientific method and accuses us of “wasting everybody’s time on a settled debate – climate change is a fact. … Climate change is not some far-off problem in the future. It’s happening now. It’s causing hardship now.”

This week, you can expect to hear the Leftmedia trumpet some Antarctic ice melt, but you haven’t heard much about the record ice pack in the Arctic, which is threatening Al Gore’s once-marooned polar bear population, because the ice is too thick for the bears to reach their primary food source, seals.

Let me repeat myself: The climate hype is not about the weather, but about a political strategy to subjugate free enterprise under statist regulation – de facto socialism, under the aegis of “saving us from ourselves.”

Indeed, Obama’s economic policies and regulations have already moved our nation rapidly toward the brink of statist totalitarianism.

And there was more evidence this week of Obama’s reckless strategy to subjugate our economy and by extension, our national security, to his “climate change” agenda.

Adding to his “War on Coal,” Obama has ratcheted up his War on Energy Independence, not only refusing to complete the Keystone XL pipeline but now going after alternative oil exploration methods by implementing new fracking disclosure rules. On top of that, he is undermining alternate transportation options for oil in the absence of Keystone XL with new regulations for trains transporting oil, and specifications for rail cars. Oh, did I mention Obama’s regulatory obstacles to constructing new refineries despite the fact that our current refinement capacity is approaching its limit?

How does this all add up?

According to columnist Terence Jeffrey, “Ultimately, it will not matter if people in government cynically promote the theory that human activity is destroying the global climate as a means of taking control of your life, or if they take control of your life because they sincerely believe human activity is destroying the global climate. Either way, government will control of your life. … In a nation where government can de-develop the economy, stop population growth and redistribute wealth both inside and outside its borders, there will still be droughts, floods and hot summer nights. But there will be no freedom.”
In his 1735 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, Benjamin Franklin observed, “Some are weatherwise, some are otherwise.” While the Left promotes its agenda as “weatherwise” and its detractors as “deniers,” fact is, they are otherwise.

Oh, wait, my bad. “The debate is settled.

SOURCE





Fossil-free isn't folly free

IF OKLAHOMA prison authorities had been able to carry out Clayton Lockett's execution using sodium thiopental, his death on April 29 would likely have been swift and relatively painless. The powerful sedative used to be part of the standard lethal-injection drug combination, but when its only American manufacturer stopped production in 2010, European governments barred pharmaceutical companies on the other side of the Atlantic from exporting sodium thiopental to the United States.

As the British business secretary, Vince Cable, made clear at the time, the point of the ban was to strike a moral pose. "This move underlines this government's and my own personal moral opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances," he said. The practical effect, however, has been to drive death-penalty states to devise new lethal injection protocols, sometimes with gruesome results.

Many Americans would say that Lockett's prolonged death was no less than he deserved for the vicious murder of 18-year-old Stephanie Neiman in 1999. But justice for murder victims isn't what the Europeans have in mind. They just want to demonstrate their antipathy to capital punishment. Refusing to sell the drugs that can make lethal injections the most humane form of execution enhances their self-image. It also turned Lockett's death from a rapid act of euthanasia into a grimacing, teeth-clenching ordeal that finally ended with a heart attack after more than 40 minutes.

There is a lesson here about the unintended consequences of economic boycotts that backers of the fossil-fuel divestment movement would do well to contemplate.

On college campuses across the country, activists have been urging administrators to adopt "fossil-free" investment policies and rid their endowment funds of shares in coal, oil, and gas stocks. Last week, Stanford became the first major university to join the boycott, announcing its intention to stop investing in "companies whose principal business is the mining of coal." Though Stanford's endowment, about $19 billion, is substantial, its actual investments in coal stocks are minimal. Divesting them will have no real financial impact on either the university or the companies. But it strikes a moral pose, and adds to the pressure on other universities to do likewise.

The biggest target of the divestment movement is Harvard, with its $32 billion endowment and outsize reputation. A student group, Divest Harvard, recently blocked the entrance to Massachusetts Hall, the university's main administration building, as part of a campaign to pressure the school to get rid of its fossil-fuel holdings. So far the university has said no, on the grounds that the endowment's purpose is to earn the income on which many Harvard priorities rely, and that "barring investments in a major, integral sector of the global economy would … come at a substantial economic cost."

Blockading the administration building may feel like disobedience in a righteous cause; students clamoring for hydrocarbon divestment may be convinced they're on the side of the angels. Are they convinced enough to risk the consequences of a weaker endowment? Such as less of the financial aid with which Harvard subsidizes 70 percent of its students?

You don't have to be an especially savvy investor to realize that divestment for ideological reasons doesn't increase your leverage, it eliminates it. Sell your profitable fossil-fuel stocks to show your concern about climate change, and the odds are they'll be snapped up by investors who care much less about the issue than you do. "It's like believing that pornography is evil," writes Canadian economist Todd Hirsch, "so you sell your stash of nudie magazines to the teenager next door."

Using economic weapons for ideological reasons so often leads to unintended and unwanted consequences. Prohibition triggered a host of negative outcomes that its promoters never anticipated, from a wave of restaurant failures to the elimination of thousands of blue-collar jobs to an explosion of crime and corruption.

To stigmatize fossil fuels and the corporations that extract them is to stigmatize the energy on which the modern world runs. This is moral preening, the hypocrisy of activists who want to strike a noble pose without paying a real-world price. Were they to get their way, the consequences would be disastrous, above all for the planet's poorest human beings, still mired in energy poverty, with all the misery it entails. A "fossil-free" future is a chimera, at least in our lifetime, and the divestment campaign can't make things better by pretending otherwise. But don't be surprised if it makes things worse.

SOURCE





Greenies trying to take control of farming and ranching

Australia:  Nationals Senator Ron Boswell has warned primary producers to take action now to maintain control over production and marketing.

In what Senator Boswell described as his last substantial speech in the Senate, he said: “What I want to do is leave all Australian primary producers with a warning: take action now to maintain control over the production and marketing of your product.

“Primary producers are under threat from a long-term strategy by a powerful and sophisticated combination of environmental zealots and major corporations that would effectively control primary production practices worldwide.”

Senator Boswell said the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, an organisation created by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and dominated by non-producer bodies, was an example of the threat.

“I regard WWF and other environmental activists teaming up with major corporations to impose conditions on producers as a dangerous development,” Senator Boswell said.

“Management of primary production is being taken away from producers and from elected governments by environmental non-government organisations. They are doing it via environmental conditions enforced by corporations.

“This was encouraged during the six years of the previous Labor Government. That government was in effect a Labor-Greens alliance, and Labor surrendered to environmental lobbyists time and again. It is time the Australian Government re-asserted its legitimate role in management of primary production.

“WWF and other environmental activists are increasingly trying to dictate what can and can’t be caught, harvested, grown or mined in Australia.

WWF is an organisation with a turnover in the hundreds of millions of dollars and 5,000 staff spread across offices in 60 countries. It is a huge multi-national business with enormous resources. What’s more, it is handling the likes of roundtables and stewardship councils on a daily basis.

“By contrast, producers are often developing responses on the run, responding as best they can to a sophisticated, well-rehearsed strategy from WWF. Let’s not pretend that, individually, any single commodity or industry representative body can handle an organisation as powerful and sophisticated as WWF.

“I call on everyone involved in productive toil in our primary industries to address this issue. Work together, and with the Australian Government, to retain the influence you deserve to have over the way your industries operate.

“Producers have a fundamental knowledge of how their operations should be conducted. Government has the scientists, economists and resource managers to assist producers. Together, they can guarantee sensible, rational, sustainable management of this nation’s natural resources.”

Via email

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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