Climate change is a religion whose followers behave like members of the Inquisition; it’s a condition where the cure is causing far more damage than the alleged disease; it’s a recipe for killing jobs, lowering standards of living and hurting the poor…

Some of us knew this already. But you rarely hear it so trenchantly expressed by a former world leader – as it was in London yesterday by Aussie ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a hard-hitting, must-read speech for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Abbott is one of only a handful of world leaders to have spoken out against the global warming “consensus.” (The only other ones, recently, are former Czech president Václav Klaus and, of course, President Donald Trump).

This gives you an idea of just how badly infected are the nations of the free world by the green virus. Even those politicians who might nurture doubts in private almost never express them in public. Abbott himself lost his job as Australia’s prime minister at least in part because he was found guilty of wrongthink on climate change, which he once famously described as “crap”. The man who replaced him as prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull – unfondly known as the “Honourable Member for Goldman Sachs” – is himself a leading tentacle of the Green Blob.

Abbott’s speech – which is causing Australia’s notoriously left-wing media to explode like ripe watermelons struck by hollow-point bullets – ought to serve as a painful reminder to Australia’s Liberal party of the talent they lost when they decided to knife this Jesuit-trained, Oxford-educated, rock-solid, family man conservative in the back and replace him with the slippery Davos-style globalist Turnbull.

Here are some of the highlights:

Climate change is a product of ignorance and an anti-Christian society

Only societies with high levels of cultural amnesia – that have forgotten the scriptures about man created “in the image and likeness of God” and charged with “subduing the earth and all its creatures” – could have made such a religion out of it.

The Inquisition

Beware the pronouncement, “the science is settled”. It’s the spirit of the Inquisition, the thought-police down the ages. Almost as bad is the claim that “99 per cent of scientists believe” as if scientific truth is determined by votes rather than facts.

If science was all about “consensus” we’d still be living in caves

The modern world, after all, is not the product of a successful search for consensus. It’s what’s emerged from centuries of critical enquiry and hard clash. Without the constant curiosity and endless questioning that has driven our scientists and engineers, and the constant striving for improvement that’s long guided our planners and policy makers, there’d be no cures for disease, no labour-saving appliances, no sanitation, no urban improvement, no votes for women, no respect for minorities; in other words, no modern world.

Greens want to make life nasty, brutish and short

That may not actually bother some green activists whose ideal is an Amish existence, only without reference to God. But it should bother anyone and everyone who wants longer, safer, more comfortable and more prosperous lives.

Consensus is not science: it’s enforced ignorance

There are laws of physics; there are objective facts; there are moral and ethical truths. But there is almost nothing important where no further enquiry is needed. What the “science is settled” brigade want is to close down investigation by equating questioning with superstition. It’s an aspect of the wider weakening of the Western mind which poses such dangers to the world’s future.

Where’s the evidence for climate catastrophe? There’s none in Australia, that’s for sure…

Contrary to the breathless assertions that climate change is behind every weather event, in Australia, the floods are not bigger, the bushfires are not worse, the droughts are not deeper or longer, and the cyclones are not more severe than they were in the 1800s. Sometimes, they do more damage but that’s because there’s more to destroy, not because their intensity has increased. More than 100 years of photography at Manly Beach in my electorate does not suggest that sea levels have risen despite frequent reports from climate alarmists that this is imminent.

…But there’s plenty of evidence that green lunacy is killing the Australian economy

Australia, for instance, has the world’s largest readily available supplies of coal, gas and uranium, yet thanks to a decade of policy based more on green ideology than common sense, we can’t be sure of keeping the lights on this summer; and, in the policy-induced shift from having the world’s lowest power prices to amongst the highest, our manufacturing industry has lost its one, big comparative economic advantage.

Renewables have more to do with virtue-signalling than with useful energy

Throughout last summer, there were further blackouts and brownouts across eastern Australia requiring hundreds of millions in repairs to the plant of energy-intensive industries. Despite this, in a display of virtue signalling, to flaunt its environmental credentials (and to boost prices for its other coal-fired plants), last March the French-government part-owned multinational, Engie, closed down the giant Hazelwood coal-fired station that had supplied a quarter of Victoria’s power.

There’s a reason renewable energy is crap and it’s so simple even lefties and greens should be able to understand it

Hydro aside, renewable energy should properly be referred to as intermittent and unreliable power. When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow. Wind and solar power are like sailing ships; cheaper than powered boats, to be sure, but we’ve stopped using sail for transport because it couldn’t be trusted to turn up on time. Because the weather is unpredictable, you never really know when renewable power is going to work. Its marginal cost is low but so is its reliability, so in the absence of industrial scale batteries, it always needs matching capacity from dependable coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear energy. This should always have been obvious.

We think we’re rational but where green policy is concerned we’re little better than the Aztecs

There’s a veneer of rational calculation to emissions reduction but underneath it’s about “doing the right thing”. Environmentalism has managed to combine a post-socialist instinct for big government with a post-Christian nostalgia for making sacrifices in a good cause. Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We’re more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect.

Global green policy in a nutshell

I’m reminded of the story of a man randomly throwing pieces of paper from the window of a train. Eventually his companion asked him why he did it. It keeps the elephants down, he said. “But there are no elephants here”, his companion replied. “Precisely; it’s a very successful method”.

Oh and by the way, the way we’re carrying on Western Civilization is on its way out…

Just a few years ago, history was supposed to have ended in the triumph of the Western liberal order. Yet far from becoming universal, Western values are less and less accepted even in the West itself. We still more or less accept that every human being is born with innate dignity; with rights, certainly, but we’re less sure about the corresponding duties. We still accept the golden rule of human conduct: to treat others as we would have them treat us – or to use the Gospel formula to “love your neighbour as you love yourself” – but we’re running on empty. In Britain and Australia, scarcely 50 per cent describe themselves as Christian, down from 90 per cent a generation back. For decades, we’ve been losing our religious faith but we’re fast losing our religious knowledge too. We’re less a post-Christian society than a non-Christian, or even an anti-Christian one. It hasn’t left us less susceptible to dogma, though, because we still need things to believe in and causes to fight for; it’s just that believers can now be found for almost anything and everything.

Good on yer, Tone!