The Cost of Energy is a blog dedicated to energy issues that shows up in one of the side bars from time to time. Each time I’ve read a post there it’s been one sneering at anyone who questions the absolute certainty of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). In this post, he is ostensibly complaining about some critic of CAGW (BTW, characterized as akin to one who denies the occurrence of the Holocaust) cherry picking some piece of data or the other.
I didn’t bother to check into that complaint because what caught my eye was the snippets he had highlighted, especially this part:
Mike Beard is a free-market conservative and pro-business. No one who calls himself those things can afford global warming to be true.
It is an article of faith among all leftists that anyone who has a profit motive is instantly more untrustworthy than those who nobly eschew profit for the pursuit of political power. In their own minds, leftists are an intellectually superior group of altruists whose predictions are always instantly more accurate than the predictions of those with grubby commercial interests.
Yet in recent history we had a major event that demonstrated how the “pure hearted” leftists flew off into a destructive flight of self-interested fantasy, while those observers who were “free-market conservative and pro-business” not only had a more objective understanding of the problem but provided a solution that benefited everyone.
Back during the energy crisis of 1973-1984, we had the exact political dynamic that we see with CAGW: On the Left we had the clear-eyed altruists only wanting the best for everyone, while on the Right we had the self-deluding, incredibly greedy and selfish energy companies who only cared for their short-term profit at the expense of everyone else.
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