Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The virulent climate rhetoric in Australia just stepped up a notch, with senior opposition MP Tony Burke comparing “climate deniers” to people who dispute the value of medical vaccines.

Climate deniers like anti-vaxxers: Labor

Rebecca Gredley

Opposition environment spokesman Tony Burke has likened climate change deniers to anti-vaxxers.

Arguing against the science of climate change is similar to not accepting the merit of vaccinations, a senior federal Labor MP says.

Tony Burke, a former sustainability and environment minister, says the Morrison government’s climate policies continue to be watered down by a handful of MPs who don’t believe in climate change.

“Their arguments are not that different to the anti-vaxxers, in terms of saying: ‘I don’t care what the science says, I have this particular view and I’m just going to say we shouldn’t adopt a policy’,” Mr Burke told Sky News on Thursday.

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Mr Burke says he recited some of the warnings to parliament in 2008, but it was labelled as a scare campaign.

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Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was rolled from the top job due to internal disputes in the coalition party room over climate change, has again entered the debate and stirred the pot.

Writing for US publication Time Magazine, Mr Turnbull says the “wicked self-destructive idiocy of climate denialism must stop”.

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Read more: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6583870/climate-deniers-like-anti-vaxxers-labor/

For all his vicious rhetoric, Tony Burke seems more interested in scoring points than actually reducing CO2 emissions. Burke led Labor’s knee-jerk rejection of affordable zero carbon nuclear power when it was briefly tabled as a possibility by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Australia has around 23% of the world’s known Uranium reserves.