Long time Murdoch business commentator Terry McCrann has for some years been one of the most thunderous deniers of climate change science in the public arena, but he’s had some stiff competition of late.
Emboldened by the election win of Donald Trump, and the president elect’s apparent prerequisite that every appointee to his administration have form on climate denial, the naysayers have been out in force. They’ve even managed to secure a Senate debate on the issue, led of course by conspiracy theorist Senator Malcolm Roberts.
This week, a commentator on Murdoch’s Fox News – the climate change ridiculing KT McFarland – was appointed to Trump’s national security team. And McCrann, perhaps sensing an opportunity, is back on the war path.
The source of McCrann’s outrage on Tuesday was the recent report by the conservative International Energy Agency, and its apparent new found enthusiasm for wind and solar.
Many, such as Professor David Stern, from the ANU Energy Change Institute, think that the IEA continues to underestimate the potential of wind and solar. But not the indefatigable McCrann, who lamented its transformation from a “sober” agency with “real energy experts” to one that had succumbed to “Global Warmism”.
In a column titled “The experts lie about renewable energy” McCrann says he is horrified by the latest World Energy Outlook, and its emphasis on wind and solar.
“The first and most important thing to understand about global warming true believers and the pushers of so-called ‘renewable energy’ is that they lie,” McCrann thundered.
“They lie effortlessly, seamlessly, continuously and without the slightest sense of shame. They lie deliberately and carelessly and casually, and even when they don’t realise they are lying. They lie without the slightest sense of self-awareness and with all the pomposity of stupidity aforethought.
“We’ve just seen a stunning, but all-too characteristic example: a lie as big as it was stupid and undoubtedly a product of an overdose of the warmist Kool-Aid cocktail of choice — denial of reality and fevered embrace of global warming theology.”
On and on it went, matching and echoing the usual suspects at Murdoch central – Andrew Bolt, Rowan Dean, Miranda Devine, Tim Blair, Gary Gray, Maurice Newman, and on and on it goes.
Bolt even found time to write: “Terry McCrann is right. Global warming crusaders and green carpetbaggers lie. They lie about the problem, lie about the fix, lie about the cost.”
McCrann attacked “propagandists like the Climate Media Centre” and even lambasted The Economist, which he said “used to be a substantive publication located in factual analysis and reality. But in the past decade or so it’s succumbed to its own unique cocktail of pomposity, political correctness and, yes, warmism.”
He then hoes into the IEA’s predictions for wind and solar, which as readers might remember, suggests that if the world does try to cap global warming at around 2°C, will likely see wind and solar become the largest sources of energy in he world, overtaking coal, oil and gas.
Of course, the IEA’s central scenario is the one that assumes the world pays lip service to global warming and locks in temperature rises of 3°C to 4°C, with the catastrophic results that this would entail.
Not that this phases McCrann: “The evidence is clear and undeniable: more CO2 means a greener planet.” Perhaps he could be the new US ambassador to Australia.
