Sneaky green mafia

AT last the ABC agrees: there is indeed a "greenhouse mafia" that's keeping you from the truth.

Its Four Corners program on Monday was right to warn that the Government's climate policy was "hijacked" by cause-pushers who gagged debate.

But here's the hitch. Reporter Janine Cohen, winner of a United Nations environment award, says this "mafia" is made up of lobbyists from gas-belching businesses.

Yet the facts show that the real "greenhouse mafia" to menace us is staffed by green lobbyists and their media mates. Exhibit A? This very same Four Corners report.

Four Corners made two claims: First, big polluters virtually dictate the Howard Government's greenhouse policy, even drafting Cabinet documents. Second, CSIRO scientists trying to warn us to cut emissions are gagged.

But let's see if this passes the fertiliser detector.

This Government is silencing green-preaching scientists? Then why does it spend $60 million a year on the Australian Greenhouse Office, which hires nothing but?

It's under the thumb of polluters? Then why is Environment Minister Ian Campbell now the holiest of green rollers, declaring the debate on global warming "over" and insisting we must cut our emissions by 60 per cent?

I sniff something that makes my roses bloom. So who convinced Four Corners of this wild conspiracy theory?

Meet Dr Guy Pearse, introduced by the show as just a Liberal Party member and speech-writer for then environment minister Senator Robert Hill.

Pearse claimed that during later research for a PhD, he met lobbyists from the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, representing very gassy businesses, who told him they were the "greenhouse mafia" and boasted of feeding the environment minister his lines.

Hmm. Would Pearse name these lobbyists? Uh, no. And that was Four Corners' proof – hearsay about the alleged skiting of anonymous guys.

Worse, these claims were denied by Campbell, the Australian Coal Association and the AIGN, yet Four Corners still built its show around them – presumably because Pearse had credibility.

What axe could he have to grind, being a loyal Liberal who even owned coal shares?

But check his CV, and . . . gosh! I see he worked on the 1996 re-election campaign of United States Vice-President Al Gore, a Democrat and global warming alarmist.

I see that PhD of his is co-supervised by Clive Hamilton, head of the deep-green Australia Institute. I see his favourite websites include those of the World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defence Fund, Australian Conservation Foundation and Michael "Fahrenheit 9/11" Moore.

ALL very odd for a man painted by Four Corners as the bluest of Liberals. Even odder that he got a job in 1997 with the Howard Government's environment minister.

And now he works for the AEC Group, lobbyists who boast of winning "contracts from government to directly assist in the policy making process". Among his past clients he lists the Australian Conservation Foundation and Australian Greenhouse Office.

Pearse seems an earnest and honest man. But forgive me if I think he might have misinterpreted whatever he was told, and if I repeat that the real "greenhouse mafia" to worry about is made up not of brown polluters, but green activists.

But what about this claim that CSIRO scientists were censored when they tried to warn us to cut emissions?

Here, Four Corners relied mainly on the word of the CSIRO's former climate director, Graeme Pearman, who has a reputation for integrity, but is also, in my opinion, an activist. Indeed, he joined a climate group formed by the World Wide Fund for Nature.

It's this that led his bosses to tell him debating greenhouse science was fine, but debating government policy was not for a public servant.

So does the CSIRO truly censor debate on global warming? Yes, but in the very opposite way to one Pearman claims, says Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge, who led the University of Tasmania's Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and was chief research scientist of the CSIRO's Division of Atmospheric Research.

Says Paltridge: "In the early '90s I was involved in setting up the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre, which was, and still is, a sizeable research institution specifically designed to examine the role of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean in global climate.

"I made the error of mentioning in a media interview that there were (as there still are) lots of doubts about the science of global warming.

"Suffice it to say that within a couple of days it was made very clear to me from the highest levels of CSIRO that, should I make such public comments again, then it would pull out of the process of forming the new centre."

THAT would have killed his centre stone dead, so Paltridge says he shut up.

He says the CSIRO didn't want global warming questioned because it was after big grants from the Australian Greenhouse Office, and he says other scientists have also learned it is "too dangerous to go against accepted wisdom that the impact of global warming will be disastrous".

So do be worried that there is a "greenhouse mafia", just as the ABC says. But watch out: the ABC is on its side.