Sceptic Watch: Blue Army: Persons of Interest

Global War on Disinformation

Money is the God of our time.

— Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856), March 1841.

[I am for] full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism — with a separation of state and economics, in the same way, and for the same reasons, as the separation of state and church.

— Ayn Rand (1905 – 82), The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964.

[We] have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.

— John Keynes (1883 – 1946), The Great Slump of 1930, 1930.

[A] refusal to submit to anything we cannot understand, must lead to the destruction of our civilisation.

— Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992), The Road to Serfdom, 1944.

Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992)

We should regard as the most desirable order of society, one that we would choose, if we knew that our initial position in it would be determined purely by chance — such as the fact of our being born into a particular family.
(1940)

[John Keynes] was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration.
(1946)

The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

[Liberalism is] a modest and even humble creed [with] a low opinion of men’s wisdom and capacities …
(Introduction)

[The] the greatest danger to liberty today comes from [those] efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
(The Decline of Socialism and The Rise of the Welfare State, Chapter 17)

It is … those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge [who] so often become the enemies of freedom …
The more men know, the smaller the share of all that knowledge becomes that any one mind can absorb.
The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends. …

The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument:

against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, [and]
against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.

(The Creative Power of a Free Civilization, Chapter 2)

[Generally speaking,] the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. …
[Like] the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the values he holds on other people. …

The typical conservative … has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. …

The chief evil [of our time] is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
The powers which modern democracy possesses would be even more intolerable in the hands of some small elite. …

The liberal differs from the conservative in his willingness

to face [our] ignorance and
to admit how little we know,

without claiming the authority of supernatural forces of knowledge where his reason fails him. …

[For the liberal] the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused.
(Why I Am Not a Conservative, Postscript)

Eugene Miller

[Hayek believed] that spontaneous forces of adjustment can [always] be counted on to produce beneficial order and growth in the future as they have in the past …

Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992):
[The] self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions.

(p 182)

[He opposed] efforts to equalise opportunities, arguing that the public’s interest is best served by allowing individuals to make full use of the opportunities available to them, even though:

these opportunities are limited to a few, and
inequality is the inevitable outcome.

(p 178)

Hayek points out that some natural resources are diminished by use and are eventually used up, while others can be so managed as to yield a durable stream of benefits.
In either case, however, he has no objection to exhausting a natural resource, if that appears to be the best strategy to maximise income.
The market offers better foresight in these matters than government planning; and one lesson of advancing technology has been that new and unanticipated resources will emerge to replace existing ones. …

He recognises an exception, however, where the aim is not income maximisation, but:

providing recreational opportunities; and
preserving natural beauty or sites of historical or scientific interest.

Such amenities render a service to the public at large, providing advantages for which the individual beneficiary cannot be charged a price. …
Voluntary efforts in this field are desirable, but Hayek does not object to government using its compulsory powers to acquire the land needed for such amenities …
(p 175)

[Hayek defended] not only entrepreneurs, but also a leisured class, whose members likely will have grown up … to feel an obligation to take the lead in intellectual, moral and artistic affairs.
In [his view, in] most of the USA, this class [had] almost completely disappeared, so that businessmen now [lacked] intellectual leadership and [had] no ‘coherent and defensible philosophy of life.’
[He believed a] progressive society requires ‘a cultural elite within the propertied class’.
(p 85)

Value is assigned not by central authority but by the market …
Judgements of individual merit are [necessarily] subjective, [whereas market] value is an ‘objective outcome’ …
[And since] the market generally assures that value is rewarded, government’s role is primarily to facilitate market distributions by maintaining the rule of law.
Certainly it has no business pursuing social justice.
(p 88)

Hayek [assumed] that applications of the Rule of Law must be governed by the public interest.
This implies that protection for individual rights can be suspended where the interest of the community requires it.

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argues [that while] legal guarantees of individual freedom are basic to ‘the normal running of society’ … they are not ‘absolute rights’ that can never be infringed …

Two such cases, which ‘can hardly be disputed,’ are

curtailing freedom of speech in a situation of ‘clear and present danger’ and
compulsory land purchase through government’s right of eminent domain.

(p 130)

(Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, The Institute of Economic Affairs & Profile Books, 2010)

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Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826)

Nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same government, so insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinions have established between them.
(Memoirs of Jefferson, M Conseil, Editor)

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.
The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.
(Notes on Virginia, quoted by Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World, 1997, p 400)

If the last king can be strangled with the entrails of the last priest, we will have destroyed the institutions that have stood in the way of human freedom.
(John & Abigail Adams, PBS American Experience, 1997)

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past …
(Letter to John Adams, 1 August 1816)

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Maurice Newman (1938)

Prime Minister Abbott's top business advisor and former ABC chairman and investment banker

I am not a climate change denier …

Maurice Newman:
Many of the people who have a different point of view on the climate science are respectable and credentialed scientists themselves.
… I'm not a scientist …
I have to listen to all points of view and then make [a judgement.]

Brendan Trembath:
Would you say you're a climate change denier …

Maurice Newman:
I am an agnostic and I have always been an agnostic and I will remain and agnostic until I've found compelling evidence on one side or the other that will move me.
I think that what seems fairly clear to me is that the climate science is still being developed.
There are a lot question marks about some of the fundamental data which has been used to build models that requires caution.

(ABC Chairman criticises media's climate change coverage, PM, ABC Radio National, 10 March 2010)

I am not a conspiracy theorist …

Even before they threatened my property, I was opposed to wind farms.
They are

grossly inefficient,
extremely expensive,
socially inequitable,
a danger to human health,
environmentally harmful,
divisive for communities,
a blot on the landscape, and
don’t even achieve the purpose for which they were designed, namely the reliable generation of electricity and the reduction of CO2 emissions.

Even if you buy the anthropogenic global warming case, experience shows that wind energy is not the answer. …
Surely the economic effect of taxing hardest those who can least afford it was thoroughly examined ahead of politically motivated empty gestures designed to placate climate change alarmists?
Apparently not.

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but we have witnessed the birth of an extraordinary, universal and self-reinforcing movement among

the political and executive arms of government,
their academic consultants,
the mainstream media and
vested private sector interests (such as investment banks and the renewables industry)

[—] held together by the promise of unlimited government money.
It may not be a conspiracy, but long-term, government-underwritten annuities have certainly created one gigantic and powerful oligopoly which must coerce taxpayers and penalise energy consumers to survive. …

All political parties to a greater or lesser degree follow the same irrational policies, mindlessly repeating slogans about renewable energy targets and CO2 reductions plans, lest they be labelled climate change deniers. …
Yet nowhere is there evidence that these policies work.
Even Europe, with its huge investment in wind energy as well as an ETS, has not reduced emissions.
[The] much-vaunted Kyoto Protocol … saw emissions of signatories grow substantially faster than those of non-signatories.
So why should we be optimistic that any future global agreement on emissions will be more successful?

Experience with trade and nuclear nonproliferation treaties suggest domestic considerations will prevail over lofty ideals.
Political correctness may go down well at elite gatherings, but it doesn’t pay the bills.
This fact is finally being recognised in Europe, where climate tipping points are now of less concern than economic tipping points. …
[Yet, in Australia, with] religious zeal and the voice of authority, we plough ahead as if consumed by a deathwish. …
At the local level this religion is evangelically spread by state bureaucrats who regularly pander to the oligopoly’s wishes. …

The harmful health effects [of wind turbines], despite peer-reviewed and anecdotal evidence, are dismissed as being unconfirmed, psychosomatic or the politics of envy. …
Not everyone who lives near wind turbines experiences adverse health effects.
But then not everyone who smokes contracts lung cancer. …

[Politicians] are lending their support to oligopolistic insiders [who] are destroying the property rights of the very people they have pledged to protect. …
[And] don’t expect help from academia, mainstream media or the public service.
They are members of the same establishment and worship together at the altar of global warming. …
Our once independent public service is no longer servant but master!
Sir Humphrey is firmly in control.

(Against the Wind, The Spectator (Australia), 21 January 2012)

Abbott, Tony

Bolt, Andrew

Bush, George W

America

The World 1

The World 2

Carter, Bob

Sceptics' publishing record on climate

Churchill, Winston

Cooke, Alistair

Foster, Gigi

Friedman, Milton

Fukuyama, Francis

Graham, Billy

Hanson, Pauline

Hayek, Friedrich

The Road to Serfdom

Fairness as Justice

Howard, John

Jefferson, Thomas

Koch, Charles & David

Lindzen, Richard

Mbeke, Thabo

AIDS Denialism

Menzies, Robert

Mill, John Stuart

Minchin, Nick

Global Cooling

The Benefits of Smoking

Murdoch, Rupert

Newman, Maurice

Nixon, Richard

Peterson, Jordan

Plimer, Ian

Ian Plimer’s ‘Heaven + Earth’ — Checking the Claims

Reagan, Ronald

Dreaming of Star Wars

Drug Wars

Roosevelt, Theodore

Rudge, Alan

Smith, Adam

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The Wealth of Nations

Spencer, Roy

Starck, Walter

Starck Raving Reefgate?

Switzer, Tom

Textor, Mark

No Excuses

King Maker

Thatcher, Margaret

Thatcher saw climate threat

Trump, Donald

Turnbull, Malcolm

Why I support the ETS proposal

Wakefield, Andrew

MMR vaccine controversy

Windschuttle, Keith

Persons of Interest

Bob Carter (1942 – 2016)

Bob Carter, SourceWatch, Center for Media and Democracy, 17 October 2011.

Carter is Chief Science Advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition, funded in part by the Heartland Institute, which is funded by the industries involved in producing greenhouse gases.

Carter is [Science Policy Advisor to] the right-wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, and a founding member of the Australian Environment Foundation, a front group set up by the Institute of Public Affairs.

Some of Carter's work has involved what is known as "paleoclimatic research," including participation in the Ocean Drilling Program Leg 181 try to create a benchmark of the 4 million year-long, mid-latitude climate record.
Funding for this program was reportedly cut around 2002, and
it is from about that time…that many [Australian journalists] began to receive helpful items from Carter, clearly meant for publication, most knocking the orthodoxy, the bleak line on global warming.

Sceptics' publishing record on climate, Science Show, ABC Radio National, 2 October 2010.
Robert Ward.

[Knock, Knock: Where is the Evidence for Dangerous Human-Caused Global Warming?] includes a quote in there that John Houghton has never said, he's never written and never said, yet it is in this paper by Carter. …

But the more I looked at the paper, almost on every sentence there was a question over its accuracy, and I went through one by one, and in the end I couldn't write a paper short enough for publication that detailed all the problems, so I just had to identify the most serious.
And he goes from making claims about a correlation between temperature and the Sun, he quotes a paper that's been shown to have used inaccurate data but he forgets to mention that, it's got dodgy statistics about the impact that carbon dioxide has on temperature, and he actually cites for his calculation a website about fossils of West Virginia.
That is not science, that's just desperately seeking bits of information to back up a theory.

… I found so many glaring errors in it, it seemed to me that it was probably the worst paper that had ever been published about climate change …

Would you like to know more?
- 2010-09-17-Carter.pdf
- 2010-09-17-RMC.pdf

Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992)

Swedish National Bank's Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (1994).

Free Market Fairness, Philosophy Bites, 16 June 2012.
John Tomasi.

When [Hayek] was in London during the bombing in 1940 he had to send his children [to safety].
He started [wondering:]
[If he were killed where] will they end up?
[They wouldn't have a father to] defend them, they could be anyone in that society.
[He] began thinking … about the appropriate way to think about a just society …
[He] came up with something like the original position, in an attempt to model fairness by using a veil of ignorance, 30 years before Rawls.

Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1976.

I have come to feel that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term "social justice." …

{A Great Society has nothing to do with, and is in fact irreconcilable with "solidarity" in the true sense of unitedness in the pursuit of known common goals.
[The] sense of elation [we feel] when we can act as members of a group aiming at common ends … is an instinct which we have inherited from tribal society …
[An instinct which] manifests itself most clearly in modern times in the two greatest threats to a free civilization: nationalism and socialism.}

[There is a] special kind of spontaneous order produced by the market through people acting within the rules of the law of property, tort and contract. …
[It is this] spontaneous order of the market that … makes agreement on ends unnecessary and a reconciliation of divergent purposes possible. …
[The] unity of mankind [depends] in the last resort [on] the striving [of its members] for the better satisfaction of their material needs.
[It is this much] disdained "cash-nexus" which holds the Great Society together …
The benefits from the knowledge which others possess, including all the advances of science, reach us through channels provided and directed by the market mechanism. …

It is, however, a misunderstanding to represent this as an effort to make "economic ends" prevail over others. …
There are, in the last resort, no economic ends.
The economic efforts of the individuals … consist in an allocation of means for the competing ultimate purposes which are always non-economic.
The task of all economic activity is to reconcile the competing ends by deciding for which of them the limited means are to be used.
The market order reconciles the claims of the different non-economic ends by the only known process that benefits all [and] is the only known method by which this can be achieved without an agreement on the relative importance of the different ultimate ends …

The aim of policy in [the Great Society is] to increase equally the chances for any unknown member of society of pursuing with success his equally unknown purposes, and to restrict the use of coercion (apart from the raising of taxes) to the enforcement of such rules as will, if universally applied, tend in this sense to improve everyone's opportunities … "on the whole" and in the long run.

(emphasis added)

The Road to Serfdom, 1944.

[The] rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. …

There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess. …
[The] competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man. …

[The] system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom. …
In the hands of private individuals, what is called economic power can be an instrument of coercion, but it is never control over the whole life of a person. …

Individualism, in contrast to socialism and all other forms of totalitarianism, is based on the respect of Christianity for the individual man …

The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual, from the cradle to the grave … was first put into practice by the socialists.

It was not the Fascists but the socialists who began to collect children at the tenderest age into political organizations to direct their thinking.
It was not the Fascists but the socialists who first thought of organizing sports and games, football and hiking, in party clubs where the members would not be infected by other views.
It was the socialists who first insisted that the party member should distinguish himself from others by the modes of greeting and the forms of address.
It was they who, by their organization of "cells" and devices for the permanent supervision of private life, created the prototype of the totalitarian party.

does not preclude

to limit working hours,
to require certain sanitary arrangements,
to provide an extensive system of social services

To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible,
to prevent fraud and deception,
to break up monopolies

for

against

planning against

minimum

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826)

3rd President of the United States (1801-9).

Thomas Jefferson, 1997.
Ken Burns.

Paul Finkelman [Historian]:
[In the Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson] suggests that blacks mate with orangutans.
He suggests they prefer white women to their own. …
He says that blacks are not as smart as whites.
That they have no skills in poetry, in music.
He says that they can never accomplish what whites can accomplish.
He compares Roman slaves to Black slaves, and says Roman slaves could do all these things because they were white. …

So that Americans come to believe in racism by reading Jefferson.
And in the 1840's and 50's … Southern racists who are defending slavery [quote] him on these issues. …

One of the defenses of Jefferson is always,
Well, he was just a Virginia Planter and we can't expect anything else from him.
He's just like his neighbors.
The point to be made is that he was not just like his neighbors. …
Jefferson was a very special man and we can expect more from him.
And so we compare him to the best of his generation.
We compare him
- to Washington — who freed his slaves
- to his cousin, John Roanoke — who freed his slaves
- to his neighbour, Edward Coles …
- to the thousands of individual small Virginians who freed their slaves.
The Free Black population in Virginia grows from 2,000 to 30,000 in the space of about 30 years.
A lot of Virginians are freeing their slaves.
Where is the Master of Montecello?
Why isn't he there?

Clay Jenkinson [Historian]:
The Declaration of Independence contains an anti-slave manifesto which Jefferson wrote.
It was expunged in the end at the insistence of the Carolinas and, Jefferson implied, several New England slave trading states. …
[It] was Jefferson's attempt to start to get at the problem of slavery. …
[He] realized that if we didn't do it then, that we would lose our revolutionary edge and reform would become more difficult every day, every year, every decade following the close of the Revolution. …

[In] the course of his life, [he proposed] more than a dozen pieces of legislation, either constitutional or state and local, that would have enabled immediate or gradual emancipation of all of the slaves, at least of Virginia. …
[Most] of them were overwhelmingly defeated or ignored …
[And] from time to time, Jefferson was denounced for his emancipationist views.

Would you like to know more?

Thabo Mbeke (1942)

AIDS and the Scientific Governance of Medicine in Post-Apartheid South Africa, African Affairs (London), 107(427):157-176, February 2008.
Nicoli Nattrass: Director, AIDS and Society Research Unit, University of Cape Town.

Demographic modelling suggests that if the national government had used ARVs for prevention and treatment at the same rate as the Western Cape (which defied national policy on ARVs), then about 171,000 HIV infections and 343,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1999 and 2007.

Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa, Journal of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 49:410–415, October 2008.
Pride Chigwedere, George R Seage III, Sofia Gruskin, Tun-Hou Lee, and M Essex.

More than 330,000 lives or approximately 2.2 million person-years were lost because a feasible and timely ARV treatment program was not implemented in South Africa.

Nick Minchin (1953)

Liberal Senator for South Australia (1993-2011).

The junk science behind Minchin's climate change denial, The Drum, ABC News, 16 March 2011.
Barry Bickmore.

[Nick] Minchin claims the globe is more likely to be cooling than warming.

Some sceptics make it a habit to be wrong, The Australian, 20 November 2010.
Mike Steketee.

The then Senate opposition leader and one of the most effective Liberal politicians of recent times told parliament:
[The Rudd government's emissions trading legislation is] the Holy Grail of all those who zealously believe in big interventionist governments controlling every aspect of our daily lives.
A few weeks earlier, he had told ABC1's Four Corners what he really thought.
For the extreme Left [climate change] has provided the opportunity to do what they've always wanted to do: … de-industrialise the Western world.
[The] collapse of communism was a disaster for the Left [so they have] embraced environmentalism as their new religion.

Ian Plimer (1946)

Director of four mining companies (SourceWatch, 2011):

Ivanhoe Australia,
CBH Resources,
Kefi Minerals, and
Ormil Energy

Professor of Mining Geology, University of Adelaide, South Australia.
Member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Ian Plimer’s ‘Heaven + Earth’ — Checking the Claims, 23 March 2011.
Ian Enting: Professorial Fellow, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, University of Melbourne.

[Plimer:]
- misrepresents the content of IPCC reports on at least 15 occasions as well as misrepresenting the operation of the IPCC and the authorship of IPCC reports;
- has at least 28 other instances of misrepresenting the content of cited sources;
- has at least 2 graphs where checks show that the original is a plot of something other than what Plimer claims and many others where data are misrepresented;
- has at least 10 cases of misrepresenting data records in addition to some instances (included in the total above) of misrepresenting data from cited source.
Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science, Connorcourt Publishing, Ballan, Australia, 2009.

Would you like to know more?

Alan Rudge (1937)

Retired electrical engineer.
Former member of the UK Government's Scientific Advisory Council.
Member of the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Organized a petition of signed by 43 fellows of the Royal Society (< 3% of the current membership of ~ 1450) opposing the society's consensus position (Webster, 2010; Lloyd and Franklin, 2010).

Walter Starck

Marine Biologist.

Neglected truths of climate change, Quadrant, 9 September 2011.
Starck raving Reefgate? Climate Shifts, 23 May 2010.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg: Foundation Professor and Director, Centre for Marine Studies, University of Queensland.

[Starck] has taken issue with GBRMPA scientist, Lawrence McCook, and 20 other leading marine scientists.
Dr McCook and his colleagues published a scientific review of the impact of marine protected areas within the Great Barrier Reef which shows
major, rapid benefits of no-take areas for targeted fish and sharks, in both reef and non-reef habitats, with potential benefits for fisheries as well as biodiversity conservation.
Dr Walter Starck has spent a good deal of time diving on the Great Barrier Reef and regularly contributes to the highly compromised Institute of Public Affairs claiming that the Great Barrier Reef is in good shape and that concerns of scientists and reef managers otherwise are sensationalized and overblown.
While he has not published in a peer-reviewed scientific paper for over 30 years, Dr Starck is a regular contributor to popular magazines including one, the Golden Dolphin, which he edits and funds himself.

Starck also does not believe in anthropogenic climate change (see under his signature under “Science and Technology Experts Well Qualified in Climate Science” on an open letter UN Secretary General His Excellency Ban Ki Moon BUT DOES BELIEVE in ‘crop circles’ …

Margaret Thatcher (1925 – 2013)

Thatcher saw climate threat, The Australian, 5 March 2009.
Mike Steketee.

In 1990 [Thatcher] made a plea for action.
The danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations …
She argued there was a clear case for precautionary international action, action that would be sensible in any event if it improved energy efficiency, developed alternative and sustainable sources of energy and replanted forests. …
In 1988, she said in a speech to the Royal Society … that three changes in atmospheric chemistry [warranted government action:]
- greenhouse gases,
- the ozone hole and
- acid rain
She …
- set up the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research …
- committed [the UK] to bringing carbon dioxide emissions back to 1990 levels by 2005 [and]
- provided funding for reafforestation in Britain and overseas.

Into the Void, The Guardian, 3 February 2007.
John Harris.

As of 1992, there was her infamous role as a "geopolitical consultant" to the tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris - a $250,000 a year job, with the same amount paid annually to the [Thatcher] Foundation.

Malcolm Turnbull (1954)

29th Prime Minister of Australia (2015-8).

Why I support the ETS proposal, edited speech to parliament, 9 February 2010.

Climate change is the ultimate long-term problem.
We have to make decisions today, bear costs today so that adverse consequences are avoided, dangerous consequences, many decades into the future.
Right now, both sides of politics are agreed that Australia should, regardless of whether any international agreement is reached, reduce our emissions by 2020 so that they equal a 5 per cent cut from 2000 levels. …

Under a market-based mechanism, such as an ETS, if a firm reduces its emissions intensity by acquiring more efficient equipment or, for example, by generating power from burning gas rather than coal, it will need to buy fewer permits per dollar of output.
There is a clear, transparent and immediate incentive, a clear price signal encouraging investment in lower emission technology.

However if a scheme operates whereby the government pays the firm to reduce its emissions intensity, leaving aside its impact on the budget and taxes, there is first going to be a substantial and contentious debate about what the correct baseline is, then whether it will actually be reduced.
Having the government pick projects for subsidy is a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale and there will always be a temptation for projects to be selected for their political appeal.
Having the government pay for emissions abatement, as opposed to the polluting industries themselves, is a slippery slope which can only result in higher taxes and more costly and less effective abatement of emissions.

Malcolm and the Malcontents, Four Corners, ABC Television, 9 November 2009.
Sarah Ferguson (1965).
Malcolm Turnbull (1954):
I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am.
(1 October 2009)

Andrew Wakefield (1956)

MMR vaccine controversy, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 6 October 2011.

… Wakefield—in partnership with the father of one of the boys in the study—had planned to launch a venture on the back of an MMR vaccination scare that would profit from new medical tests and "litigation driven testing".

… Wakefield predicted he "could make more than $43 million a year from diagnostic kits" for the new condition, autistic enterocolitis."

Wakefield was found guilty of serious professional misconduct [by the GMC] on four counts of dishonesty and 12 involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children, and was ordered to be struck off the medical register.

[Vaccination] rates in the UK and Ireland dropped sharply, which in turn led to greatly increased incidence of measles and mumps, resulting in a few deaths and some severe and permanent injuries.

Keith Windschuttle (1942)

Editor: Quadrant.

Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation, Quarterly Essay 43, September 2011.
Robert Manne: Professor of Politics, Latrobe University.

Windschuttle [began] his history with Tasmania, where between 1803 and 1834 the entire 'full-blood' indigenous population, thought by scholars to have numbered about 4000 or 5000 people, had either died or been exiled to Flinders Island. …
Far from it being a case of genocide, as the left-wing fabricators of Aboriginal history supposedly claimed, Windschuttle argued that the establishment of the colony was one of the most gentle in the history of the British Empire. …

The Aborigines had no concept of land or property.
Their misguided attacks on the British settlers were nothing more than criminal acts motivated exclusively by the desire for consumer goods. …

He attributed [the annihilation of the indigenous population] to their susceptibility to introduced disease and to the willingness of the menfolk to prostitute their women by handing them over to the British arrivals.
Unhappily, the Tasmanians were so backward a people that they were unable to generate a leadership wise enough to renounce their ancient way of life following the arrival of the British settlers and seize the bounty of British civilisation so generously offered them. …

[According to Windschuttle] a mere 118 Aborigines died a violent death at British hands (later revised to 120) is based on two propositions …
- that every Aboriginal death at British settler hands must be recorded in an extant document and
- that, after battle, no Aborigine ever died of wounds. …
Keith Windschuttle:
[We] should see them as active agents of their own demise …
The real tragedy of the Aborigines was not British colonization per se but that their society was, on the one hand, so internally dysfunctional and, on the other hand, so incompatible with the looming presence of the rest of the world …
They had survived for millennia it is true, but it seems clear that this owed more to good fortune than to good management.
The 'slow strangulation of the mind' was true not only of their technical abilities but also of their social relationships.
Hence, it was not surprising that when the British arrived, this small, precarious society quickly collapsed under the dual weight of the susceptibility of its members to disease and the abuse and neglect of its women.
(The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, Macleay Press.)

Magazines with a lot of history, Counterpoint, ABC Radio National, 8 August 2011.

[Action on climate change is] a threat to freedom …
… Vaclav Klaus [(President of the Czech Republic) was recently in Australia] to spread the word that the Greens … are people who want to restrict everything that everybody does …
Who want to tell everybody
- how to live their lives …
- how the economy should run …
- which businesses should be allowed to publish and which won't, and
- what time you'll be able to drive your car into town …
[That's] the kind of social engineering and social authoritarianism [that] anyone who edits Quadrant has got to be against …
[Our] agenda is the defense of Western civilization [against] an intellectual Left who … think that Western society is fatally flawed by a whole range of things, Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism, you name it, Western society is supposedly guilty of it …

[After 9/11] a small number of people of the Left [swapped sides —] the editor of the New Republic … turned out to be patriot after all …
But I think that was a kind of short term change and [Christopher] Hitchens is really the only major convert …

[Regarding the Norwegian atrocity in July 2011] the sort of stuff I'm saying … doesn't provoke murder …
I don't preach violence …
I don't say anyone should be killed …
I'm entirely committed to the idea that rational debate is the way you solve things and good policy and good culture … comes from looking at the evidence and logic and civilized discussion …