"Can't see the light or sense the heat"

I do love Phillip Adams.

Reading his most recent column on Tuesday was a joy. And it was somewhat coincidental that he highlighted Michael Duffy, who I'd intended to make a post about.

I would normally give you the link, but I'm going to copy and paste Tuesday's column word for word. The bolding is mine.

10 April 2007

THE Weekend Australian's front-page story was headlined "Planet in peril, says UN". No, it wasn't about an invasion of aliens combining H.G. Wells with Orson Welles. Or about a huge asteroid heading for New York, invariably the preferred target. It was another episode in the ongoing story of humanity's attempts to commit suicide via climate change. Previously known as the greenhouse effect or global warming, the new name was coined by US conservatives because it sounded more comfortable.

Whatever you call it, it's nasty. The scientific consensus as of now? The Australian's science writer Leigh Dayton explained: "Nearly a third of the world's plants and animals face extinction, billions of people will be affected by water shortages and countries ... will be racked by disease and starvation." And, like the world's temperature, Dayton was only warming up.

This newspaper erred on the side of caution, but climate change is no longer the province of left-wing ratbags. Grim meteorological predictions crowd our pages. Yet many a conservative sceptic refuses to surrender.

Michael Duffy is a full-time bias balancer. Show him left-wing bias and quick as a flash he'll balance it. Duffy's ABC radio program Counterpoint is intended to neutralise this columnist's left-wing whingeing while The Sydney Morning Herald sees his columns compensating for the anti-Howard rants of Alan Ramsey. Better balanced than most conservative pundits, Duffy is too smart for simple-minded denial. Feeling duty-bound to rubbish climate change, he does so from a more sophisticated angle. Instead of deriding the science, he insists the crisis is wildly exaggerated because of the Left's psychological need for an apocalypse, that we get our rocks off by contemplating catastrophe. Anything less than the death of billions would disappoint.

There's some truth in some people needing to believe that the end is nigh. Millenarian members of Pentecostal Christianity are forever predicting the end - the Rapture - and regard the prospect of Judgment Day with jubilation. Far from being leftists, the fateful faithful identify with the hard Right, swearing allegiance to God-botherer extraordinaire George W. Bush.

It is Bush who pushes this barrow, which has always included blind support for Israel. According to American evangelicals the existence of the Jewish state is a precondition for the Second Coming, and an opportunistic Israel isn't going to say no to the backing of millions in the US.

Yet Duffy overlooks this brand of doomsayer while talking up the Left as Chicken Lickens on global warming. The people I know who've been warning about climate change for decades remain motivated by a desire to reduce it, whereas most Pentacostalists remain indifferent. Heading for heaven, who cares if there's climatic hell on earth?

Xenophobia is another odd tactic from those willing to make Australia a burnt offering for the coal industry and John Howard's prospects for yet another term. Alexander Downer is one of the voices chorusing that we shouldn't be taking notice of these foreign blow-ins, the likes of Al Gore and Nicholas Stern. Who do these people think they are? Coming here and telling the Australian Government, the Australian people, what do to!

This from the Government that takes its riding orders from blow-ins with their own Boeings: Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney.

This line of attack ignores the small problem that the Government has been ignoring Australian climatologists for 10 long, ever hotter years. And we now know that they've also been ignoring their head of Treasury.

But any excuse for inaction is gratefully received, whether it's in the form of private advice from mining chief Hugh Morgan to Howard, or pseudo-science from the nuttier think tanks. Switching from Bush-style denial to what he calls climate realism (think-tank code for "it's left-wing bullshit but we have to pretend to calm the voters"), our Prime Minister will strike appropriate poses and announce more time-wasting policies, macro and micro. Macro? A move to nuclear power that will take a mere 10 to 20 years, or to "clean coal", which may take forever. And in the micro category? A switch to fluorescent light bulbs. All this allows business as usual. Nothing changes, except the bulbs.

Or we're to have faith in the free market which, by and large, got us into this mess in the first place. Odds are our governments will fail us.

Our industries, lacking the lash of legislation that smog-choked California used to try to force responsibility on Detroit, dawdle. The Prime Minister's main concern remains the next election and corporate leaders remain focused on the bonuses they'll get from next year's profits.

Some apocalypse. Our world ends not with a bang or the Rapture. Just with very bad weather.