Jordan Peterson, Michael Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg - Assholes Aplenty At UK Denial-Fest

Playing all your favorite hits from yesterday - and today!!

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At the conference, U.S. author Michael Shellenberger told the large audience, “carbon emissions have flatlined and slightly declined over the last decade”, and downplayed climate change’s well-documented influence on extreme weather and nature. He asserted that “renewables are not able to provide the reliable energy we need” and advocated gas and nuclear energy, claiming that fracking for shale gas had been “demonised” by climate activists. Shellenberger went on to call climate change a “secular religion” adopted to replace belief in god and urged his audience to “love humanity, that is something our opponents in the Malthusian anti-human left are unable to do”.

The conference also broadcast a speech via video link from U.S. scientist Steve Koonin, who has questioned the extent of human influence on the climate. At the ARC event he reportedly said there is no climate crisis, and claimed that not funding fossil fuel projects in the developing world is “immoral”. Koonin told DeSmog he based his remarks on reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, along with “original data, or quality peer-reviewed literature”. “That can hardly be called denying climate science,” he said. Koonin acknowledged that he had “questioned” policies to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

ARC advisory board member and former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott used the launch of a paper on energy security, held “on the outskirts” of the ARC conference, to reaffirm his climate science denial. Abbott reportedly told the Institute of Public Affairs think tank event that climate change has “nothing to do with mankind’s emissions”. He added: “The climate cult will inevitably be discredited, I just hope we don’t have to endure an energy catastrophe before that happens.”

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Peterson gave a 40 minute speech in which he said ARC was opposed to any “top down globalist view” and any policy involving “compulsion”. He then chaired a panel with ARC advisory board member Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish writer who has regularly downplayed the threat posed by climate change. Lomborg is the author of the 2020 book “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet”. On the panel, Lomborg said policies should be pursued based on the questions “how much will this cost and how much good will it do?”, before suggesting that money and resources spent on climate change would be better spent on improving maternal health and education globally.

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https://www.desmog.com/2023/11/03/climate-science-denial-rife-at-launch-of-jordan-petersons-arc-project/