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BACK in July last year in a boardroom of a western Australian free-market think tank, the extrovert British climate change sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton was holding court.

The topic for discussion? How to better capture the Australian media to help push a right wing, free-market and climate sceptic agenda. At the time, Lord Monckton was in Australia at the behest of a mining association and Gina Rinehart to deliver a series of talks on climate change and spread his conspiracy theories that human-caused climate change is a left-wing plot to bring down the West.

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EVER heard the one about climate scientists being a bunch of rent-seekers just out to chase taxpayers money, or the one where climate change scientists are just part of an elite left-wing conspiracy out to trample on the heretics?

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This is the first in a series of occasional posts I’m writing to grow an idea I’m calling “Deep Accountability.”

Currently, fossil fuel industry lobbyists, flacks, allied pundits, and government officials are far too comfortable dismissing concerns about what their pollution does to other people. In their minds, it’s a big country, there’s plenty to use, and pollution is no big deal as long as it creates problems forother people. Permanently contaminate water tables with gas drilling’s fracking fluids? Just cart in water for those other people.

The problem is, we really don’t have a big enough country to trash it like we’ve been doing. In fact, we can’t afford to trash it much more at all. But fossil guys operating with a time horizon of a quarterly earnings report or an election cycle can still nurse the illusion that the status quo is OK. That’s because the effects are still falling on just a few other people. They think anyone who speaks up about the problem must be silly, wimpy, unpatriotic, or not living in “the real world.”

With global pollutions trend lines escalating in the wrong direction, it’s pretty clear that by the time the fossil guys wake up to the realities of what they’re doing to the rest of us, it will very likely be too late to reverse the damage. According to some experts, it might be already.

Simply put, it’s been too easy for the pro-pollution crowd to ignore the realities of what they are advocating. The accountability-free zone needs to end.

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CLIMATE science denial think-tank the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow is flying a four-strong delegation to next week’s UN climate conference in South Africa, with a promise to engage in a “balanced, civil and genuine” dialogue.

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A UK-based climate change denial think-tank has been caught making serious misrepresentations on climate policy which go against the guidelines of the UK's charity regulator.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, set up as a charitable organisation by former UK Conservative finance minister Lord Nigel Lawson, has been gaining traction in some media outlets who are turning to the foundation in an apparent attempt to "balance" their stories on climate change.

But in providing balance, Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, shows those media outlets are also helping to spread mistruths.

Writing in The Guardian, Ward looked back on public statements and media interviews given by Lord Lawson since his foundation was launched in November 2009 and found at least five examples where the public had been misled.

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THERE’S a new climate denial lobby group on the block - bravely regurgitating previously debunked pseudo-science and making wild unsubstantiated claims that climate scientists are all corrupt.

Not happy with misrepresenting the science on climate change, The Galileo Movement has also misappropriated the name of the father of modern science who was persecuted for his insistance that the Sun, rather than the Earth, was the centre of the universe.

The Galileo Movement, launched in Australia, has stated its prime mission is to stop the Government’s current efforts to introduce a price on greenhouse gas emissions and boasts a list of advisors resembling a who’s who of international climate change denial.