Professor David Shearman, author ofThe climate change challenge and the failure of democracy. (He is touted as a professor, but the University of Adelaide website fails to have a bio or contact details for him that I can find. I'll keep trying.)
Just in case you thought you might have misconstrued where he was going with the title of this little piece of quality (that incidentally has a picture of....wait for it.....an iceberg on the front), he made it nice and clear in an opinion piece where he extolls the virtues of the Chinese government and makes it pretty clear he is no fan of "liberal democracy", as he puts it:
Cimate change, is democracy enough?
We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. It is not that we do not tolerate such decisions in the very heart of our society, in wide range of enterprises from corporate empires to emergency and intensive care units. If we do not act urgently we may find we have chosen total liberty rather than life.
I told you this guy was scary. Way scarier than anything Al Gore was banging on about. I've actually lived in China, which is interesting for the fact that it manages to turn you off both unrestrained capitalism and communism, all at the same time. I also got used to the fact that you have to register your whereabouts with the local police, who can, and will visit you at odd hours to make sure you're not stealing state secrets or having sex with Chinese people.
The authoritarian nature of the Chinese government may seem attractive to environmentalists because they can choose to put a blanket ban on plastic bags virtually overnight, but they can also kick you out of your centuries old house to build a new highrise or MSG factory, flood your town, or accidentally give most of your village HIV.
Dr. Shearman also gets into bed with the wimmin (and not in a fun way) by suggesting that having children makes global warming worse, that we should cancel the baby-bonus (from my cold, dead hand David) and force people to pay a climate tax on their children.
Paying a fine when you have children, thats sounds familiar, where have I seen that before? Oh, thats right! China! The one child policy fines people (alot) for any subsequent children after baby number one. Interestingly, theres alot of multiple child Han families around in China these days. They're called rich people. How does breeding more snobs help the planet?
Not content with just advocating for a totalitarian state, he has also suggested that we should stop globing warming because we might get sued:
Professor David Shearman (and co.) reviewed the scientific evidence for the effects of global warming and analysed the legal basis of potential legal claims. They said the scientific evidence showing the "human signature" on global warming was as great as that linking cigarette smoking with cancer.
So far I'm hoping that the only people actually listening to this guy are our old buddies over at Doctors for the Environment, where he maintains a sporadic blog and, I suspect, had something to do with their Population Policy. (If you have a few minutes its quite a read, it manages to tie in everything from the war on terror to impending innundation of Pacific islands without really coming up with any clear goals. I came out of it with the general impression that they want current Australian citizens to stop having babies so we can bring in more unskilled refugee migrants, move to the bush, join hands and sing Kumbaya.)
If you feel like catching up with David, you can find him at the next DEA student meeting in Melbourne, where he will be a guest speaker.
"Well, of course we're going to throw poo at him!"
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