Climate skeptics compared to slave owners

The tax-payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation has published an article which compares people who oppose the Emissions Trading Scheme, to slave owners in Britain in 1806, who opposed the abolition of slavery.

The article was written by Simon Longstaff, Executive Director of the St James Ethics Centre, a man who has previously spoken out against European settlement of Australia, and proudly appears in the ABC Opinion section of its website.

Longstaff says: "I want to suggest that global warming poses an ethical challenge of an order equal to that faced by Members of the British House of Commons when debating Wilberforce's bill to abolish the slave trade in 1806".

"If the standard scientific predictions prove to be correct, then there are millions of people whose lives will be diminished (or lost) simply because we were indifferent to their interests when compared to our own. In essence we will be preferring our comfortable affluence to their survival."

"It is the scale of the disaster that might befall us that raises the issue of global warming to the same level as the abolition of slavery."

The ABC is funded by Australian taxpayers.