The prattling of climate change sceptics/deniers in the National Post has been ridiculed by one of its own editors. In recent comments on the CBC's The National, Jonathan Kay repeated observations he made in a column some years ago in which he accused deniers of being "a liability to the Conservative cause." In his article he observed, "In the case of global warming, this [cognitive] dissonance is especially traumatic for many conservatives, because they have based their whole worldview on the idea that unfettered capitalism—and the asphalt-paved, gas-guzzling consumer culture it has spawned—is synonymous with both personal fulfillment and human advancement. The global-warming hypothesis challenges that fundamental dogma, perhaps fatally."
Referring to the blather of such journalists as Terence Corcoran and Rex Murphy, he declared that it was "Fine-sounding rhetoric—but all of it nonsense." One wonders why the National Post persists in publishing what one of its own editors thinks is nonsense.
Particularly when he believes "the impulse toward denialism must be fought if conservatism is to prosper ... Otherwise, the movement will come to be defined—and discredited—by its noisiest cranks and conspiracists." What with Stephen Harper's enemies' list and Joe Oliver's ranting about environmentalists hijacking our regulatory system with the help of foreign interests, one wonders if that isn't already the case.
Naomi Klein, in "This Changes Everything", concludes that denialism isn't really a dispute over the science, the facts, but an instinctive response to what logically flows from those facts. This is a group that perceives climate change as an existential threat to their Holy Grail - free market capitalism. Every meaningful response to climate change entails state intervention, regulation and collective action and they see that as putting their cause into retreat if not outright rout. So desperate is their position that educated, intelligent people are willing to fall back on this whole thing being a hoax perpetrated by scientists. That's the best they can muster and they know it.
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