Outside Consensus There Is No Salvation

A Senate committee revives the spirit of the Inquisition as it hunts for heretics

Free speech is, once again, on trial in Australia. This time those who seek to protect us from dangerous ideas sit on the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy.

There was a telling moment at one of its hearings in Melbourne. The select committee’s deputy chairwoman, Labor senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah, was locked in a robust exchange over climate science with Institute of Public Affairs executive director Scott Hargreaves and his deputy, Daniel Wild.

Ananda-Rajah: “Yesterday we heard 99 per cent of scientists now believe. The thing about science is it is contested until it is not. When consensus is arrived at, it is not contested any more.”

Hargreaves: “I completely disagree with that conception of science.”

Ananda-Rajah: “So you would be the outlier.”

Wild: “That is astonishingly author­itarian.”

Ananda-Rajah: “Certainly it is; that is how science works. It is contested until it isn’t. There is such an overwhelming body of evidence.”

The senator is a medical doctor with a doctorate from the University of Melbourne, so she knows more about science than most. But she must have missed the day they taught the epistemology of science because the greatest minds in its philosophy and practice would disagree with her.

Karl Popper, one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers of science, argued that science progressed through falsification, not consensus.

Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, warned that “no amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”.

Richard Feynman, Nobel prize-winning physicist, insisted that science was “the belief in the ignorance of experts” and rested on relentless scepticism.

Thomas Kuhn, historian and philosopher of science, showed that scientific consensus often collapses suddenly.

But even this cast of giants is not beyond question. I would not want the senator silenced or censured in arguing her ideas, no matter how much of an outlier she is from mainstream thinking.

The problem is she, and most of her committee, would extend no such courtesy to those who demur from their dogmas.

They seek to remove the right to dissent from groups such as the IPA, the Centre for Independent Studies, and a host of regional community groups who dare question the wisdom of destroying Australia’s environment and energy systems in the pretence of saving the planet. Most are not arguing the toss over humanity’s role in climate change. They are disputing the public policy consensus on the solution.

This committee is investigating how false or misleading information about climate and energy spreads, who is behind it and how it affects politics, the media and public debate. It stands on the shaky foundation of a certainty that there is an unambiguous consensus on every element of both.

It is part of a co-ordinated international effort. At the UN’s climate jamboree in Brazil, 13 nations signed a declaration warning of “the growing impact of disinformation, misinformation (and) denialism” and urging governments to build legal and regulatory frameworks to counter it.

This is just the opening gambit. In June, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, delivered a report calling on states to “defossilise knowledge” by criminalising what it defines as misinformation, misrepresentation and greenwashing by fossil fuel companies, as well as criminalising media and advertising firms that amplify it. It also wants bans on fossil fuel advertising, prohibitions on industry lobbying, and criminal sanctions for those deemed to obstruct climate action.

In the long tradition of the political maxim that says you should never hold an inquiry unless you know the result, the Senate committee chairman, Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, declared his hand the day the Australian inquiry was born.

“For decades, vested interests have been waging a global war of disinformation against the clean energy transition, including environmental and climate legislation, and these vested interests have recently achieved significant political success in nations such as the US,” he said in a press release.

So, the conclusion has already been written and the committee’s majority is now just trawling for evidence to support its case.

Its agenda is clear: to rigidly define what can or cannot be discussed, and propose that laws be passed to silence dissent. Most of its members are also convinced that there is a vast right-wing conspiracy funded by dark offshore money that is fuelling community-level opposition to wind, solar and transmission projects in Australia.

Big coal, oil and gas are “astroturfing”, funding fake community groups to give the impression of resist­ance where none actually exists.

It is true that millions of dollars a year are pouring into the country through the Sunrise Project, but the committee majority is not interested in that because it supports their cause.

This cash is sprayed through a bewildering array of environmental groups, as long as they back the development of industrial wind and solar and oppose nuclear energy and all forms of fossil fuel. The result is a Faustian bargain that ensures there are few friends of the Earth in the NGO-industrial complex when the wilderness is bulldozed to grow a forest of turbines.

In full disclosure, I was at the Melbourne hearing to sit alongside one of the community groups that does defend the local environment, Rainforest Reserves Australia. I have reported its resistance to wind farms in north Queensland and formed a friendship with its vice-president, wildlife photographer and cartographer Steven Nowakowski.

Nowakowski has produced the only publicly available map of all existing and planned wind and solar farms in Australia. He was pilloried for exposing their massive footprint, despite it being meticulously documented. No government agency has produced anything similar. The day after the map went live Nowakowski’s computer was hacked and all of the thousands of data points that built it were stolen.

Rainforest Reserves is deeply dangerous to the industry-government-activist consensus because it is providing information and advice that is mobilising community opposition to projects Australia-wide. This is the kind of grassroots action the Greens once applauded.

When it was pointed out that Whish-Wilson opposed a wind farm in Tasmania, he argued that was different because he had been “campaigning relentlessly against fossil fuels – something I’ve not seen from Rainforest Reserves”.

Like all of us, Whish-Wilson lives in a world that is marinated in coal, oil and gas. There is not a single structure, appliance or object in the modern landscape that wasn’t made by, moved by, or built from hydrocarbons. So, alas, every member of the global opposition to fossil fuels is living a lie, and they can sustain their position only by lying to themselves.

In Australia the government’s blueprint for a wind-and-solar-dominated eastern grid to 2050, and beyond, demands enough gas to power 15 million homes. The system will not function without it. Yet Whish-Wilson, and many in Labor’s ranks, oppose gas.

Is it disinformation to point out that this is absurd? It is the definition of tyranny to be forced to agree with a fantasy.

The Senate is not engaged in an inquiry; it is running an inquisition. If politicians and bureaucrats get to determine what is true, then every Australian is one opinion away from being labelled a threat. It is hard to overstate how serious this is.

Now we are at war. This is no longer just a skirmish to keep the lights on, to protect our jobs, industry and our local environment. This is a battle for the democratic right to disagree. It is time to mobilise. Speak out. Support Rainforest Reserves Australia in any way you can.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”