Dear Angus Taylor ... let me remind you of our encounter at Oxford and why it matters

Dear Angus Taylor,

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor.

When you say that you remember Naomi Wolf living a few doors down from you in Oxford 28 years ago, I wonder if you’re mythologising a much less glamorous encounter with a fellow female student – me?

Naomi Wolf wasn’t at New College when you and I were fellow Rhodes Scholars there in the early 1990s. She had been there in the 1980s, but she was long gone by then, riding the wave of publicity for her book, The Beauty Myth. Newly arrived from the patriarchal colonies, I was avidly reading the bestseller at the time – I would have noticed if Wolf was living among us or had come back to visit. She did not.

Read the opinion piece from The Age by Denise Myer - “Dear Angus Taylor ... let me remind you of our encounter at Oxford and why it matters.”

William Happer: Trump aide pushing climate denial inside the White House

By the early 1990s, the man now dubbed the “chief climate change skeptic” in Donald Trump’s White House had already decided he was uneasy with the science that showed humans were heating the planet.

William Happer in Trump Tower in 2017.
Happer has pushed to challenge the
 government’s findings that the climate
crisis is a national security threat.

William Happer, the former Princeton physicist now on Trump’s National Security Council, was then in charge of energy research under George HW Bush.

He asked experts at the Department of Energy to discuss their work with him and was displeased with the attitude he sensed from a climate researcher, according to a story recalled by two of his colleagues.

“They were not just defensive; they just weren’t going to entertain questions,” said Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a critic of the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.

Two years later, when Bill Clinton entered office, Happer got into a public disagreement with Al Gore, then the vice-president, over evidence that refrigerant chemicals were eating a hole in the ozone layer. Happer was soon relieved of his government job.

Read the story from The Guardian by Emily Holden - “William Happer: Trump aide pushing climate denial inside the White House."