“The last of my great crusades is the climate crusade,” Australian geologist Viv Forbes said.

“There are a lot of geologists supporting my climate crusade because they’ve read a bit of geological history, they’ve read climate history they know there is nothing new about today’s climate,” he said. 

The Mises Seminar was held in Sydney, Australia, on 25-26 November 2011. The event was organised by Aussienomics, an Austrian-Australian group, Liberty Australia and the Macquarie University Libertarian League.  One of the speakers was Viv Forbes, a geologist, economic analyst and farmer from Australia.

He is the chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition, established to defend the role of carbon on Earth and in the atmosphere, and the executive director of the Saltbush Club.  Forbes is also a pasture manager and soil scientist, with a background in geology.  Fobes has upset the climate alarmists sufficiently to have earned himself a profile page on De Smog, an activist journalist website that focuses on topics related to climate change and smearing those who speak out against the Globalist narrative in its ‘Climate Disinformation Database’.

Forbes was born in 1939 just as the tanks were rolling into Poland.  He doesn’t remember anything about that particular period but he does remember what happened in the 10 years after the Great War.  It “sowed the seeds to many of the things that we’re reaping today,” he told the Mises Seminar.

He ran through a list of things that he remembers happening throughout his childhood and youth from an Australian perspective.  He also described his long history of activism and entanglements with politics.

“The last of my great crusades is the climate crusade,” he said.  “And it has undoubtedly been the most successful. I guess because it’s easier to explain to people what a scam it is,” he said.

“There are a lot of people, particularly geologists, there are a lot of geologists supporting my climate crusade because they’ve read a bit of geological history, they’ve read climate history they know there is nothing new about today’s climate.  There’s nothing extreme. There’s nothing new. The fluctuations are very minor. The temperature is very moderate. And even if it warms up a bit, we’ll probably benefit.”

Explaining how he got into fighting the “carbon crusade” Forbes explained that it was when he attended a meeting of the National Pollution Inventory Committee.

“[They were] telling us in the mining industry what we were going to have to report to the government every 6 months about what terrible polluting things we were doing. And they listed all the pollutants and they were listing all the ways and how we were going to have to report all this stuff. And one of the pollutants listed was carbon dioxide. That really hit me like a sledgehammer,” he said.

“I’m a farmer. I’m a soil scientist. I understand the carbon cycle,” he said. “I could not believe that even someone so stupid as those in the Department of Climate Change could consider carbon dioxide a pollutant by any stretch of anyone’s imagination.  I decided then and there that I was going to have to expose this stupid scam.”

The more he learned about the “climate crusade” the more he learned how shallow the whole thing was. “There is no basis for almost any of the claims being made,” he said.  “Except, it is true that mankind is affecting the environment … obviously we’re affecting the environment.  We’re putting things into the air and into the water.  [But] we’re not controlling the climate.”

“The carbon dioxide is certainly not one of the things we need to be concerned about,” he added.

“There are common features in all of these battles I’ve been involved in.  In all sorts of industries, they’re all the same features.  On the other side the same philosophies, in many cases the same people [and] the same organisations,” he said.  “They are the centralists.  The people who want more power.  The people who want [who] want to abolish all other sources of power or influence.”

Centralism is a political doctrine which emphasises the concentration of power, authority or control in a central entity, such as a government or institution.   Synonyms for centralism include authoritarianism, totalitarianism and hierarchicalism. These terms all convey the idea of a centralised authority or structure, where decision-making power is concentrated at the top and flows downward.

Forbes continued:

“They want to abolish local authorities and replace them with regional authorities.  They want to abolish state governments and any sort of federal system.  They want to abolish the Upper Houses.  They want to even remove most of the power from national governments.

“They don’t want anybody to be able to upset, call into question or, heaven forbid, vote on any of the things that they are aiming at.  They want to abolish private property and they want to confiscate guns.

“They’re all the same people. The same organisations. They all promote the myth of centralised organisation.”