Naomi Klein:

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Via MeFi. Klein later makes a point that had occurred to me in the past:

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

Emphasis mine. There is something unintentionally honest about conservative and libertarian climate change denialism, and I would find it sort of endearing if its potential ramifications weren’t so dire. Faced with broad scientific consensus on the reality of the phenomenon and a litany of lefty-friendly ways of dealing with it, conservatives could have countered with free market solutions that fit their political philosophy better. Cap and trade was originally considered one of these, although it’s managed to magically become “socialist” pretty quickly.

Instead, they have opted to deny the science and question the political motives of people who are actually in touch with reality (an example of projection so perfect, it’s almost comical). That this is the nature of the “debate” seems to me like an implicit admission that, were climate change real, a free market system would be ill-equipped to deal with it on its own.

This is not to say that conservatives who come to the scientifically correct conclusion about climate change should take a big bong hit, pop a book on tape of the Communist Manifesto into the stereo of their VW van and have a total conversion experience. It’s just depressingly telling that ideological flexibility is considered so much of a shortcoming these days that causing our descendants’ lives to be worse is preferable to acknowledging flaws in a belief system.