Australians should be wondering why the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), one of the country’s proudest think tanks, has just established a body promoting nuclear energy that appears to have little to justify it. If the CIS truly believes in the project, surely it would have sought a leader with a stellar resumé?

Earlier this year, environmental journalist George Monbiot warned that the chance of simultaneous harvest failures in the world’s major breadbaskets was “much worse than we thought.” He poured his fury onto the old industries deploying as many Atlas Network-style “junktanks (‘thinktanks’), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to drag our eyes away from what counts, and leave us talking about trivia and concocted bullshit instead.”

The 500+ global “partner” bodies of the Atlas Network have, for decades, been forming metastasising entities such as “think” tanks to create the sense of a chorus of academic or public support for the junk science and junk political economies that serve their funders. The primary goals have been to liberate plutocrats from any tax or regulation, and fossil fuel bodies have been amongst their most prolific donors.

By contrast with the billions spent to “stop collapse from being prevented,” the effort to prevent Earth systems collapse is led by people “working mostly in their own time with a fraction of the capacity.”

The Atlas strategy involves networking promising ultra-free market spruikers with the astonishing sums of money that fossil fuel and similar industries spend to promote their goals. The spruikers can be trained and cross-connected. Some are helped to create benign-named bodies that describe themselves as think tanks or academic institutes (beachheads) in universities. They found fake grass roots bodies (astroturfing) to pressure politicians into believing that there is public support for a policy. Youthful scholars or strategists co-opted and funded by the machine go on to export the work into politics and the media.

One Australian example is the founder of the Australian Taxpayer Alliance, Tim Andrews. He was a graduate of the Koch Associate Program, a year-long training program at the Charles Koch institute, and worked at the Atlas-partner Americans for Tax Reform for two years. Koch is one of the most significant figures in the Atlas Network’s spread. Andrews is now a member of the UK Atlas Partner, the Taxpayer Alliance Advisory Council.

High profile mining figures in particular unite many of these bodies. In Australia, Hugh Morgan’s name, for example, is present in many of their histories. He assisted Greg Lindsay in turning the CIS from a “part-time hobby” into the more serious institution that it became. Morgan was described in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1985 as “the most important conservative figure in Australia. He is not merely an outspoken captain of industry, he is at the centre of a large and growing network of activists who are seeking to reshape the political agenda in this country.”

In America there is an extensive web of such networks and bodies that interact together. The Atlas Network is important for its international forays into 100 countries, working to infect debate with this American ideology that overwhelmingly promotes the right of corporations to extract resources at any cost to the nation exploited.

The CIS claims to encourage “debate among leading academics, politicians, media and the public.” It announces itself to be “proud to be associated with some of the greatest leaders in business and academia as visiting lecturers or as CIS members, staff or Directors.”

The CIS tended to maintain the dignity that mission statement conveys. It has traditionally acted in the background by contrast with the blowsy, brawling Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). The contrast is even starker with the farcical LibertyWorks Inc which created the local Trumpist circus, the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). These two Atlas partners are best known for devising “low” strategy campaigns identifiable as a “war on woke.”

The HR Nicholls Society, like the CIS, pitched its campaigning as “high” strategy: intellectually framed and directed at the upper echelons of civic debate. West Australia’s Mannkal Economic Education Foundation is tightly connected with the Mont Pelerin Society. Queensland’s Australian Institute for Progress, the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Australian Libertarian Society are all amongst the benign-sounding bodies that have been recorded as partners to Atlas.

The Bert Kelly Research Centre, which was linked to the Family First ultraconservative movement, and the Bennelong Society, which acted to fight any First People policy apart from assimilation, are defunct Atlas-connected operations.

Bennelong (denying First People’s self-determination) and HR Nicholls’ (shackling workers) shared a post box and phone number with the Lavoisier Group which continues to post climate denial material. The websites for Lavoisier and Bennelong were designed by a functionary at the IPA.

GetUp! was founded to give the electorate a voice against Dark Money in 2005. This challenge to state capture could not be allowed to stand: to counteract the progressive electorate’s voice, figures associated with the CIS established Advance Australia. As Advance, it led the No campaign for the Voice referendum, reflecting fossil fuel money’s fear of First Peoples’ rights working in cooperation with environmental goals. Dr Jeremy Walker highlighted the Atlas connections and strategies involved while investigative journalist Anthony Klan tracked the people and money that connect the various shadowy bodies that spawned from the parent.

It is not CIS’s fault that this tawdry astroturf collective shared founders, funders and “researchers” with the more dignified CIS.

The CIS Communications Director Karla Pincott recently informed that the CIS was not founded nor funded by Atlas, neither of which has been asserted. Amongst the body’s proudly “public record” and “peer-reviewed” research, she claimed that the CIS’s only “carbon research to date has recommended a carbon tax.”

In the light of this comment it is interesting that the CIS has just announced the creation of its new “CIS Energy Program” which “will offer tangible energy solutions to address concerns about climate change, focusing on nuclear power and the clean energy transition.”

With CIS’s proud tradition of proclaimed reputable research, one would imagine that such a program would be led by a notable figure in the energy field, perhaps a leading academic or professional.

The figure selected to head up this project describes himself as “not a professional with any sort of industry inside experience” nor does he have any “particular credentials.” Instead he is a “kind of interested, enthusiastic layperson.” He says he “sort of stumbled across” the Twitter (X) debate and “threw my two cents in.” While he has a physics degree, he sums himself up thus: “I follow things on Twitter a little bit. I’m interested in economics. I’m interested in energy. I’m interested in physical systems. I’m interested in military technology.” When discussing his climb to relevance as a Twitter debater this year, Morrison said, “I barely even know…I know a couple of the energy debaters.” One would imagine that a person selected to head up a CIS research project would know the thought leaders in the field.(1)

Morrison’s latest video production is much more sophisticated than earlier efforts.

Incidentally, a 16 year-old who is another leading voice via “Nuclear for Australia” has been harnessed by Sky News for the Coalition.

Tom Switzer, departing presenter of the ABC’s “Between the Lines” gave the youth the full 55 minutes of his show. Switzer is also executive director of the CIS where he announced his thinktank’s new “Energy Program” as an opportunity to use the “market” to drive clean energy goals instead of “pitting economic growth against climate goals.” He did not speak to how Morrison himself was selected.

The Liberal Party is promoting the “small modular reactor” as an alternative to renewables. It has long been established that this is a distraction rather than an affordable change. It is believed that the LNP and associates’ support for nuclear power is another in the long list of distractions that the fossil fuel industry has funded to delay and prevent change.

Figures from “think” tanks are platformed on current affairs programs and quoted as though they have expertise. Their important or benign-sounding bodies’ names give gravitas to their declarations. Their donors are generally concealed and thus their intent can be treated with some suspicion.

On the 18th December, Chris Kenny on Sky hosted “CIS Energy Program Director Aidan Morrison” as a “data scientist” who has conducted an “expert review” of the grid planning. Morrison’s study, in Kenny’s summary, “has concluded these documents play all sorts of tricks to try to ensure that renewables look like the cheapest option, when in fact they’re not.” (2) Kenny stated Morrison’s data science “work has been so impressive he’s just been appointed to head up the Energy Research Program for the Centre of Independent Studies.” Kenny incorrectly accuses that the renewable energy push has “already caused huge supply problems and cost increases in our electricity grid” and is “now set to make problems even worse.” The pair both criticise the exclusion of nuclear as a solution, portraying it as an ideological decision rather than a pragmatic one. Kenny uses Morrison’s work to conclude: “we have expert confirmation that it might not even work. We might not have enough energy available when we need it. An energy rich country without enough energy…What a shambles.”(3)

Australia must legislate to ensure that such bodies are transparent about funding. Charity status should only be granted to bodies that work with integrity. Figures who represent these bodies ought to be labelled at every appearance as representing vested interests if they cannot meet the required standard for integrity.

Fossil fuel has delayed the global community acting in a calm and relatively painless way last century, in order to ensure it extracts profit as long as possible. Far North Queensland is right now experiencing unprecedented floods, another in a concatenation of “unprecedented” catastrophes. It will soon be too late. We are long past tolerating delaying strategies.

If “think” tanks want to be treated as having credibility, then this new “CIS Energy Program” is a troubling signal.

And we truly hope their mission statement remains: “The Centre for Independent Studies promotes free choice and individual liberty, and defends cultural freedom and the open exchange of ideas.”

Postscript: The Leader made an incorrect assertion about the new Gencost report on a 2GB interview on the 21st December criticising it for examining costs through an investment lens. That incorrect assertion was later repeated by a senior Liberal figure.

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(1) This is Morrison’s full introduction to himself when asked to provide his relevant background to be a guest on a podcast about baseload energy. I have cleaned it up for clarity by removing repetition and most linguistic fillers. The sound was quite distorted at some points but I listened to it repeatedly to achieve the fairest representation of Morrison’s words. “I’m not a professional with any sort of industry inside experience or anything like yourself. I’m a data scientist at the moment. I work writing computer code to trade in futures and other assets. So I don’t have any special technical insight other than [physics degree?] which I suppose helps in deciphering some of these things. So I’m an …kind of interested, enthusiastic layperson. People can hold that against me if they want but I hope they do their best to focus on the arguments and engage with them as opposed to just writing off [people and credentials?] on me. I do have a physics degree. I studied [at ANU…?] I’ve always been a bit of a fan of nuclear power since I studied nuclear physics. I found that it was a really compelling thing. All the solutions to make the problems, which it has, well managed, just seem extremely elegant, extremely satisfying. And I think when you engage with those from a physics perspective, it’s easy to get quite excited by it. But so I follow things on Twitter a little bit. I’m interested in economics. I’m interested in energy. I’m interested in physical systems. I’m interested in military technology. I have a little nascent, fledgling YouTube channel called Miltechntac that I’m working on getting some more videos out for. But yeah, that’s me. I just sort of stumbled across this and threw my two cents in.”

(2) Morrison’s review of renewable’s arguments in the same podcast sounds like this: “Their whole model and what they’ve done there to me is totally opaque and it could be a complete and utter mess. I don’t think I can fix it by just adding in one thing. Maybe it’s right though, and I can’t see exactly other ways in which it’s clearly wrong. I’ve got a few ideas actually. But they need to come back and produce a credible and transparent model that does incorporate all the costs we actually incur for those later stages of renewables, not riding on sunk cost. And there could be other problems still maybe, but they can start with this that they have definitely not included the cost of building the infrastructure up to 2030…”

(3) Threats to the power grid remain rare. The warning in NSW last week was the result of two units at the Mr Piper coal power station being offline, one unexpectedly. The blackout did not eventuate. Power prices have largely resulted in massive windfall profits for the gas sector. The other talking points spread by nuclear boosters are addressed in the latest Gencost report just released.

It is important to remember Brandolini’s Law.