Why the Coalition should stop trying to silence nuclear power critics
O’Brien dismissed the inquiry as a “sham”.
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Messenger-shooting is an old sport in politics and has a particularly rich history in climate and energy policy.
Just over a decade ago, the incoming Abbott government wasted no time in knocking off the Climate Commission, an advisory body established by Kevin Rudd. Its chief commissioner, Tim Flannery, was sacked over the phone within hours of the government being sworn in. A few months later, the CSIRO’s “Climate Adaptation Flagship” was also knocked on the head.
Now, in the US, the Trump administration is at work not just unpicking the considerable achievements of Joe Biden in climate, as we have reported, but even scrubbing references to climate change from official websites, including that of the White House.
This week the president ramped up his attack on the very fabric of the science the world is relying on in its response to climate change by preventing a group of scientists from attending a planning meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s key climate science body.
The journal Nature has since reported that a US State Department delegation will not attend the meeting, and that NASA has cancelled funding for a team to provide administrative and technical support to the IPCC’s climate-assessment effort.
The sudden withdrawal of US expertise and funding will have a profound impact on the UN’s next major assessment of the state of the climate, and in particular on the world’s mitigation efforts, says Dr Pep Canadell, chief research scientist with CSIRO Environment.
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Any retrenchment of Australian efforts in combating climate change is minor league by comparison, and it is not at all clear that any incoming Coalition government would be as enthusiastic in its opposition to science as the Trump 2.0 administration.
But as heating accelerates, the world can little afford to have its elected representatives solving political problems by shooting the messengers that serve us all.
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