Lavoisier Group AUS
ICCC
Climate Exit (Clexit) is a climate science denial group formed shortly after the UK’s decision to leave the EU. According to Clexit’s founding statement (PDF), “The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.”1
As DeSmog2 and Climate Home reported, many of the UK‘s leading “Leave” campaigners also have a history of promoting climate science denial.3
Viv Forbes, an Australian climate science denier and a director of Stanmore Coal, serves as secretary of Clexit. Other notable climate science deniers serving on the “Clexit Committee” include Christopher Monckton (President) and Marc Morano (Vice President).
Introducing Clexit’s founding statement, Forbes announced that the enforcement of the Paris climate treaty would be “a global tragedy”:
“For the EU and the rest of the Western world, ratification and enforcement of the Paris Treaty (and all the other associated decrees and Agendas) would herald the end of low-cost hydrocarbon transport and electricity, and the exit of their manufacturing, processing and refining industries to countries with low-cost energy,” Forbes said. “Carbon dioxide does not control the climate. It is an essential plant food and more carbon dioxide will produce more plant growth and a greener globe.”4
As DeSmog reports, another key member of Clexit’s “60 well-informed science, business and economic leaders” is Hugh Morgan, a former board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia5 and former CEO of Western Mining Corporation with close ties to Australia’s Liberal party.6
According to Clive Hamilton’s book Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change, Hugh Morgan was a central industry figure in building opposition to climate action within the Liberal Party in the 1990s and early 2000s. Morgan was also the president of the Lavoisier Group, an organisation that fought against ratification of a previous UN climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol.7
Clexit Founding Statement
The Lavoisier Group is a global warming skeptic organisation, based in Australia. It argues that the evidence for global warming is based on inexact science and that any policy responses, such as signing the Kyoto Protocol, would be too expensive for Australia's industry.
The group is closely associated with the Australian mining industry, and was founded in 2000 by Ray Evans, then an executive at Western Mining Corporation (WMC), who was also involved in founding the HR Nicholls Society and the Bennelong Society. Hugh Morgan, former WMC boss and head of the Business Council of Australia until 2005, delivered the group's inaugural speech.
clive hamilton:
Although Australia does not have the proliferation of well-funded conservative think tanks that have been so influential in US politics, local counterparts have served effectively as conduits for the stream of anti-science pouring out of their kindred organisations in the United States. They have also been instrumental in publicising and promoting the work of Australian sceptics such as Ian Plimer and Bob Carter. There are three established think tanks and a new one emerging.
Lavoisier Group:Perhaps better described as an advocacy group than a think tank, the Lavoisier Group was founded in 1999 by Hugh Morgan, then CEO of Western Mining Corporation and a former president of the Mining Industry Council, and his long-time political operative Ray Evans. Its board consists mostly of mining industry figures. Evans has close links with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for some years the most active denialist think tank in the United States.
Evans, with Morgan's backing, had created a string of organisations promoting conservative causes, including the anti-union H.R Nicholls Society (with which the Lavoisier Group shares a postal address) and the Samuel Griffiths Society, committed to defending states' rights.
The Lavoisier Group brings together leading sceptics at its conferences, promotes sceptics' books, and publishes material such as "Nine Lies About Global Warming", penned by Evans and parroted by sceptical columnists in the newspapers. A book edited by Evans was last year launched by Senator Barnaby Joyce, now the shadow finance minister.
Institute of Public Affairs: The oldest think tank in Australia, and with close links to the Liberal Party, the IPA took up the denialist cause early. The IPA is coy about its funding sources, but is known to have received the bulk of its income from mining, resource and tobacco companies. In addition to promoting the work of Australian sceptics like Ian Plimer, the IPA has hosted international visitors such as Bjorn Lomborg and Mark Steyn, events attended by Liberal Party heavyweights.
The IPA also sponsored the visit to Australia of President Putin's former adviser Andrei Illarianov who fulminated against "fraudulent science" and described the Kyoto Protocol as a "death pact", "an interstate Auschwitz", "a sort of international Gosplan, a system to rival the former Soviet Union's", an argument bizarre even in the world of climate denial, but reasonable enough to be reproduced by *The Australian*.
Centre for Independent Studies: The CIS projects itself as a more moderate conservative think tank, but has not been able to resist promoting climate scepticism. After struggling in its early years, it was reprieved by a major funding boost from six mining companies, a rescue facilitated by Hugh Morgan. Among its board members is Sir Rod Eddington, a senior business adviser to the Labor Government. It has hosted a string of climate sceptics from overseas and Australia.
Brisbane Institute: The Brisbane Institute has for some years been a middle-of-the-road think tank but appears to have been taken over by climate sceptics. Some of its followers were shocked to hear that the Institute would host the Brisbane leg of Christopher Monckton's Australian tour.
Last year the Brisbane Institute hosted a public lecture by Dr Jay Lehr, Science Director of the Heartland Institute. As we saw, the Heartland Institute is now the most active climate denialist organisation in the United States. Lehr was presented by the Brisbane Institute as an "internationally renowned" scientist, which is simply untrue; he has been heavily criticised for distorting and misrepresenting climate science. He is better known for spending three months in jail for defrauding the US Environmental Protection Authority in 1991.
The Brisbane Institute is perfectly entitled to take the denialist road. The puzzle is why the University of Queensland, the Institute's primary sponsor, would support an organisation that promotes anti-science. Paying for Monckton and Fehr to trash climate science in Brisbane does not seem compatible with the University's aim "to achieve internationally-acknowledged excellence in all forms of research".
Several scientists from the University serve as authors or reviewers for the IPCC, a body attacked as fraudulent by Monckton and Lehr. The University of Queensland appears unconcerned about linking itself with climate denial. In 2008 it accepted a donation of $350,000 from a climate change sceptic, channeled through the IPA, who wanted it to be spent on funding doctoral research on climate change. Of course, the University said there would be no strings attached.
These think tanks are at the heart of the denial movement in this country. They provide funding and organisational capacity, they convene conferences and private meetings, they commission sceptical scientists to write papers, they publish and promote sceptical papers and books, they supply "experts" to the media and they lobby at every opportunity.
Every sceptical scientist, no matter how independent he starts out, is sooner or later drawn into the web formed by these think tanks. In Australia, Bob Carter is a favourite of the Heartland Institute and the Lavoisier Group, Ian Plimer is an associate of the Institute for Public Affairs and an adviser to Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation, and William Kinninmonth (the Australian sceptic with perhaps the strongest claims to being a climate scientist) allowed his book to be launched by the Lavoisier Group.
The links of these sceptics to political organisations with strong ideological agendas stands in sharp contrast to the vast assemblage of legitimate climate scientists who have no political connections. Yet it is the latter who are accused of being politicised.