Climate change denial and "free-market" ideology

Darrel Moellendorf writes in Conservatives, John Locke, and Climate Change Dissent 07/07/2011:

Among American conservatives, there is now a standard anti-government line that would incline them to approach regulatory policies with hostility. But that has nothing to do with climate science. You would think that one could have a free-market economic and philosophical bent and still be perfectly sane about the science of climate change. Shouldn’t we expect the majority of free-market advocates to endorse the position of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, at least at similar rates to the rest of the public? And yet Republicans have only become more skeptical regarding anthropogenic climate change in the last decade, even as the consensus among climate scientists remains overwhelming. It starts to look like an admirable - but deeply wrong - political philosophy has been twisted by a political ideology or corrupted by industry funding, or both.

Tags: global climate change, science denial

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