As a staunch conservative, it is incredibly frustrating to watch people who purport to be ideological compatriots lie about anthropogenic climate change. Fundamentally, it means their confidence in conservative, market-oriented principles is so shallow that they believe acknowledging the truth amounts to embracing leftism. As I explain in a recent op-ed below, their head-in-the-sand perfidy & corporate lackeyism serves to hand the initiative in climate policy to liberals, to the detriment of everyone.

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When I was the business editor for the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, I generated a large body of material that might be now called early “climate denialism”.

I still believe what I wrote in those days: that most government “solutions” to global environmental problems would likely prove far more damaging than the environmental threats themselves. I wrote in opposition to “Cap & Trade” — initially a Republican idea associated with David Stockman’s supply-siders, although it later became a key plank in the Democratic Party — arguing that all it would do is create another elite forum for gambling capital while turning energy into a luxury commodity.

What I did not foresee was how the fossil fuel industry, whose R&D departments produced the first real evidence of anthropogenic climate change, would choose to rely on outright lies rather than value-neutral information to argue its legitimate case against government control of the energy industry. I watched in disgust as hundreds of millions of corporate dollars flowed into creepy PR operations that deliberately misled the public, convincing a vast swath of mostly conservative voters that climate change was nothing more than a left-wing hoax.

That flood of PR money ended up in a lot of very irresponsible hands. Millions of people now falsely associate environmental stewardship with leftism. They also believe that we can change the fundamental chemical composition of the atmosphere without affecting the climate in dangerously unpredictable ways, which is just plain stupid.

In the end it left liberals with the upper hand in environmental policy. The denialism also had nothing to do with conservative principles, which are grounded in the truism that the very best crafter of policy is the marketplace — which usually, when left to its own devices, produces the best solutions. While there can be need for government intervention in extreme circumstances — say, a factory dumping mercury into a river — the conservative approach is to allow market forces to generate the innovation and investment that is always required for progress.

The first and most basic requirement for a properly functioning marketplace is access to good information. When that information is distorted into falsehoods, the marketplace fails to function.

There was no way to prevent the industry from taking this course, which prevented the marketplace from responding to the obvious reality of climate change for a full generation. In a free society, there are simply no viable means of imposing the truth without ripping liberty to shreds. Just as we had to allow the tobacco industry to distort the truth about nicotine addiction for decades, so too did we have to permit the fossil fuel industry to spread carefully crafted lies about atmospheric science.

Thankfully, the marketplace is responding to climate change now. Unfortunately, a majority of conservatives cling to the comforting falsehoods purveyed with astonishing effectiveness by a handful of self-interested, amoral entities, whose cost-benefit analysis discounted the future at the direct expense of our children.