High and Dry by Guy Pearse

Author:Guy Pearse [Pearse, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science, Earth Sciences, Geography
ISBN: 9781742284057
Google: 1F9BbqblJaoC
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2007-06-27T23:33:02.976970+00:00

Ray Evans

Evans worked as Hugh Morgan’s offsider during his twenty-year career at Western Mining Corporation. Where Morgan has provided the high-level influence, Evans has done much of the day-to-day work of running the campaign. Evans is the one who openly challenges the science in the Lavoisier Group, of which he is secretary. He has been the one organising testimony at parliamentary hearings;92 he has been the one preparing the Lavoisier Group’s propaganda, writing the op-ed pieces in the national media and telling the AIGN that even they are too timid. He has also organised the platforms for home-grown and imported sceptics of greenhouse science and promoted their views, cultivating sceptics within the Liberal Party room and conservative media. When the most prominent Internet sceptic of all time (John Daly) died, Ray Evans co-wrote the obituary.93

More than any other player in the greenhouse debate in Australia, he has been responsible for pedalling the view that climate change is ‘green religion’ rather than a serious environmental problem requiring solutions. Says Evans: ‘To put it in its bluntest terms, when you don’t believe in God you believe in nothing. You believe in whatever is the fashion of the day, and environmentalism has scooped the pool.’94 Evans, meanwhile, has described himself as ‘a Genesis 1:28 man’, in reference to the following passage in the Bible: ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it …’ When the PM warns of ‘religious fervour’ and ‘sermonising’ over climate change, Ray Evans smiles, for he planted the thought. As well as the neoliberal think-tanks and press, this attitude has won over Cardinal George Pell, whose support Evans gleefully quotes, as though God himself is against cuts in greenhouse emissions.95 Evans holds controversial scientific views as well as religious ones: he regards CO2 as good for the planet because plants thrive on it – the more we put into the atmosphere, the more we can ‘fertilise the planet.96

He strongly opposes any investment whatsoever in carbon capture and storage on the grounds that it is a ‘totally unnecessary expenditure’ because climate change is a hoax.97 Windmills used to generate renewable electricity are totems to pagan gods. He advocates a High Court challenge against any wind farm approved by the federal government.98 Recently Evans described Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth as ‘bullshit from beginning to end.’99 It would be farcical were it not taken so seriously by the Howard government.

Evans and Oxley have been the main go-betweens for the Australian and American carbon lobbies. It was Evans who travelled to the US for the infamous meeting with the American Petroleum Institute, the CEI, the US National Mining Association, and Ford that planned the campaign to kill off Kyoto in Australia and the US. Evans then worked closely with the CEI, the Cooler Heads Coalition (of which the Lavoisier Group became a member), and through his successful efforts to undermine Australia’s greenhouse responses won the respect of the most prominent US sceptics, as they repeatedly make clear in public statements.

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