Question Earthority!

I think perhaps we are … and it’s not a good place to be at.

The folks at Grist note a new manifesto from more than 150 businesses calling for “tackling climate change” as a “pro-growth strategy.”

CLS at Classically Liberal takes a dimmer view, asking “Why is business support for warming hysteria surprising?” and correctly answering his own question (it shouldn’t be).

Setting aside the question of whether global warming is real, anthropogenic and problematic (a question dealt with at length in QE’s last guest editorial) or just superstitious hysteria as CLS would have it, it’s clear that the vultures are beginning to circle.

When businesses go from “there is no global warming” to “yes there is, and why don’t WE do something about it,” odds are that the play for subsidies and awarded monopolies is about to begin.

When the environmental left stops screaming “greenwash!” and starts applauding “big business’s initiative,” odds are that deals are about to be made.

This is nothing we haven’t seen before.

It was “big business” and the “progressive” movement which created the web of anti-trust legislation that established Big Oil as a nearly invulnerable catrtel for a century.

It was “big business” and the “progressive” movement which centralized utilities, made them “public,” dubbed them “natural monopolies,” and thus protected coal power from competition for just about as long.

And when that competition was allowed, in the form of “big business”-provided nuclear energy, it was subsidized as well via the Price-Anderson Act that covered nuclear’s insurance tab (or, more precisely, provided taxpayer-funded “insurance” to an industry that real insurors wouldn’t touch).

Now that the market has broken free and begun to provide consumers with increasingly cost-efficient energy that, as it happens, greatly reduces consumption and emissions, the same infernal combinations are coming together to chain that market down again and make sure that those with political clout get their cut — environment and consumers be damned.

How to appeal within the democratic processes that are being manipulated to protect the incestuous relationship of government, big business and the environmental lobby? I still think that coming to the right conclusions concerning the reality and nature of global warming is key. It’s as impossible to appeal to the majority who side with science by declaring that science is an ass as it would be to appeal to Roman Catholics by citing Zoroaster.