Why Bjorn Lomborg must be silenced

Dr Rajendra K. Pachauri, the somewhat discredited former head, for 13 years, of the IPCC, said 'For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.'

At its extreme, Green objectives are starkly presented in remarks attributed to David Foreman, co-founder of the appropriately named Earth First: "My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with its full complement of species, returning throughout the world… The human race could go extinct and I for one would not shed any tears… The optimum human population of earth is zero… Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental… We must all work together in order to save the environment and the world that we live in from further change."

To achieve these goals it will be necessary to abandon our current political system. Bob Brown, founder of the Australian Greens says: "The future will either be green or not at all… For comprehensive Earth action, an all-of-the-Earth representative democracy is required. That is, a global parliament."

Our own Klimate Kardashian and founding member of the Climate Council, Tim Flannery, is even more scary: "We will form a global community with a set of shared beliefs… In an ant colony only a few ants can reproduce... very true in human society as well"

In the immediate future, Green policy calls for a target of 100% renewable energy, which simply cannot be achieved in Australia without radical changes in the way we live. To advocate this target, while fighting hydro-electricity (more dams) and nuclear power is far more radical than most people realize.

The argument that people are causing climate change, and that people, and therefore climate change, can be controlled by appropriate legislation, as determined by an international and unelected parliament, is irresistible to the Greens.

Many of the solutions advocated by Lomborg rely on small scale projects carried out at the grass root level by people, not governments – the antithesis of Green policy.

The 'Big End of Town', the supposed enemy of the Greens, is actually in full agreement with them. They provide most of the capital required to achieve renewable energy targets, and they profit from having a guaranteed market at a guaranteed and highly subsidised price for their product. They are naturally reluctant to lose their subsidies.

When Tony Abbott announced that he had instructed the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation not to finance new wind power projects, an industry spokesman said: "The decision is another blow for the multibillion-dollar wind industry, which has just started to recover from the uncertainty created by the government's Renewable Energy Target review. Analysts say $8.7 billion is expected to be invested in wind power in the next five years, while the corporation has invested about $300 million in wind projects to date."

The Clean Energy Finance Company was set up by the Gillard government, to provide capital investment in all sorts of renewable energy. It started investing two years ago, making contracted investments of $900 million in its first year.Its investment mix is 33 per cent solar, 30 per cent energy efficiency, 21 per cent wind and 16 per cent other technologies.

The Minerals Council of Australia states that: "[a] report undertaken by economic consultancy Principal Economics, found that Australia's renewable energy sector received subsidies (including the Renewable Energy Target, feed in tariffs and other green policy costs) worth $2.8 billion in 2013-14. This dwarfed the public support for research and demonstration projects for low emissions coal technologies being conducted by the CSIRO and other research bodies (and matched by the coal industry).

"On an output basis, these renewable subsidies translated into almost $412 per megawatt