News & Views item - February 2006

 

 

The Greenhouse Mafia: Part II. (February 21, 2006)

    In a February 16th Viewpoint we reported on the ABC's current affairs program Four Corners "The Greenhouse Mafia" which was based in major part on material provided to it by Guy Pearse, Speechwriter for the Environment Minister from 1997-2000 Senator Robert Hill.

Dr Clive Hamilton

 

Dr Pearse told Four Corners "I’ve discovered why Australian... greenhouse policy is being driven by the mining and energy sectors."

Dr Pearse appeared to paint a picture in which it is the senior bureaucrats who are putting it across the parliamentarians to whom they were ostensibly responsible.
 

Now Clive Hamilton, Chair, Climate Institute (Australia) and Executive Director of The Australia Institute, Australian National University and one of Dr Pearse's PhD supervisors, in an address given yesterday before the Australia and New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference in Adelaide has significantly amplified the views expressed by Dr Pearse.

 

Dr Hamilton singled out a group of 12 individuals which include Prime Minister John Howard, businessman Hugh Morgan and The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell - "the dirty dozen".

 

He left little to the imagination when he told the conference,

Behind the daily news reports there is a secret world of politics in Canberra, the world in which the real business is transacted. It’s a world of powerful lobbyists who use methods both subtle and brutal to advance their own interests without a care for the effects on other Australians. Because the way it works is so contrary to the democratic process, it is in the interests of those involved never to speak of it in public.

 

...climate change policy in Canberra has for years been determined by a small group of lobbyists who happily describe themselves as the ‘greenhouse mafia’. This cabal consists of the executive directors of a handful of industry associations in the coal, oil, cement, aluminium, mining and electricity industries. Almost all of these industry lobbyists have been plucked from the senior ranks of the Australian Public Service where they wrote briefs and cabinet submissions and advised ministers on energy policy.

 

The Howard Government has allowed the greenhouse mafia extraordinary influence over Australia’s stance on climate change. Alone among the nations of the developed world, key members of fossil fuel lobby groups have actually been made members of Australia’s official delegation that has negotiated - or more accurately, attempted to derail - international agreements on climate change, notably the Kyoto Protocol.

 

When I asked one senior businessman [not a member of the GhM] why his company was unwilling to publicly urge the Government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol he said that ministers made decisions affecting their commercial interests every week and they did not want to see the decisions start to favour their competitors.

 

If early intervention failed and a proposal to tackle greenhouse gas emissions got to Cabinet - such as occasionally happened when Robert Hill thought he could get something up - the mafia would turn to its closest friends in Cabinet to knock it off. Said one: “if we wanted to put a spoke in the wheel of Robert Hill or whatever we could do it pretty quickly … we reverse-managed that ministerial (greenhouse) committee so many times”.

Dr Hamilton then refers to a meeting in May 2004 called by Prime Minister Howard of the LETAG, the Lower Emissions Technology Advisory Group, which consists of the CEOs of the major fossil fuel companies. According to Dr Hamilton "we know about this meeting because private notes made by Sam Walsh, Chief Executive of Rio Tinto’s iron ore division, were leaked."

 

It will be recalled that at the time Robin Batterham, chief technologist for Rio Tinto, was also servingas Australia's Chief Scientist for two days a week, a position he continued to hold until his resignation in May 2005.

 

"The Prime Minister told this highly select group that his Government was in political trouble over greenhouse policy as it was being outmanoeuvred by the NSW Government and by Mark Latham," Dr Hamilton told his Adelaide audience and "The Government was looking for an alternative so that it could kill off MRET [Mandatory Renewable Energy Target].

 

Passing on to the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), Dr Hamilton is scathing.

[T]he Government itself released the most devastating critique of it.  ABARE’s [Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics]analysis of the effects of the partnership on global greenhouse pollution is summarised in a little diagram included in its report.5 To the extent that one can believe anything ABARE’s modelling shows, it concluded that under the best-case scenario annual global emissions will increase from approximately 8 gigatonnes of carbon equivalent now to over 17 gigatonnes in 2050 under the influence of the AP6 agreement.

 


    The consensus among climate scientists is that annual emissions must be reduced to around 3 gigatonnes to prevent the worst effects of global warming. Even Ian Campbell says he accepts this. So 14 thousand million tonnes of carbon annually have gone missing in the Government’s calculations.

In the second half of his address, Dr Hamilton said, "The greenhouse mafia of industry lobbyists have not, of course, been the only people preventing Australia from taking climate change seriously and, for the historical record, the main culprits need to be outed. So let me nominate the twelve people who in my opinion have done more than all others over the last decade to prevent any effective action to reduce Australia’s burgeoning greenhouse gas emissions."

 

But first, The full text of Dr Hamilton's speech is available at  http://www.tai.org.au/WhatsNew_Files/WhatsNew/CC in Adelaide Final.pdf 

 

And it's only right that we include a comment by The Australian's Jan Frazer,

Heat on climate sceptics

    AUSTRALIA Institute executive director Clive Hamilton made a series of warnings yesterday that recalled dire predictions in the 1970s of mass starvation from overpopulation. "Populations displaced by rising seas, millions dying from famine from the effects of climate change and millions more struck down by diseases associated with the transformed climate," Hamilton told the Climate Change and Business conference in Adelaide. He also revealed a strong line in ad hominem abuse of perceived opponents, "naming and shaming" the editor-in-chief of The Australian Chris Mitchell as one of the "dirty dozen" of Australia's "greenhouse sceptics". Mitchell's in good company. Others in the "dirty dozen" are John Howard former Western Mining chief executive and leading greenhouse sceptic Hugh Morgan, former Labor senator Peter Walsh, Howard's industry minister Ian Macfarlane and former trade ambassador Alan Oxley.

Hamilton's  Dirty Dozen --

Hugh Morgan - CEO of Western Mining

John Eyles - headed up the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network

Ron Knapp - The Australian Aluminium Council

Alan Oxley - Chairman of Monash University’s APEC Study Centre

Peter Walsh - old Labor political war horse

Meg McDonald - has joined Alcoa as its head of corporate affairs

Barry Jones - former head of APPEA

Chris Mitchell - editor-in-chief at The Australian

Ian MacFarlane - former industry minister in the Howard Government

Alan Moran - head of the Regulatory Unit at the Institute for Public Affairs

Malcolm Broomhead - CEO of chemicals and mining company Orica

John Howard - Prime Minister of Australia

Dr Hamilton lists why each has been included in what might be described as his "murder of crows".