From Q&A, 15 March 2010
- TONY JONES: ...is climate change and global warming a conservative idea? Do you think the scientists are conservative or radical?
- WALEED ALY: I think they're being scientists... Let's just all be honest. Most people in this room, unless there are climatologists among us, really have no idea about whether or not climate change is real. What's happening, though, is that we make decisions about whether or not we are going to believe that it is real or not and usually we make those decisions on the basis of what we want the answer to be and that is why you find that at the moment on the conservative side of party politics around the world you are more like to find people who are climate sceptics or denialists because - because that side of politics has overwhelmingly bought into the idea of neo-liberalism and the idea that the free market should be our guiding philosophy. Not just the free market is a good thing, but it's our guiding political philosophy. And when you buy that, climate change becomes very difficult to accommodate. So this becomes an ideological contest for people who are of that persuasion, because the minute they accept the reality of climate change, it destroys the idea that the market is our guiding philosophy, and so they are forced, essentially, to start from a position that says, well, we need to deny this, and then they will look around for data and scientists here and there and so on...
