The economic basis of climate change denialism

Paul Krugman, Digby and Amanda Marcotte all speculate on on climate change denialism. But they focus on the politics; they're missing the economic factor. Denialism is rising fast, which means that people with money, serious money, are funding it. And people with serious money aren't stupid: they put their money where their economic interests lie.

The right wing has been against environmentalism in general for many decades, and it's not just to "piss off the liberals". The crux of the biscuit is that in general, labor extended on environmental activities does not produce profitable commodities. You can't bottle clean air, you can't wrap a healthy ecosystem and sell it at Best Buy: you can't rent the capital to workers and take the exchange the surplus labor for your own profit. The only way to improve the environment is by taxes, and these taxes come, one way or another, out of the pockets of the rich.

The only non-commodity production the right wing is interested in supporting is the military and the police. (It's ironic that Libertarians, those soi disant opponents of coercion, support the socialization of only the police and the military, whose only raison d'être is actually coercing people. Libertarianism without coercion is anarchism, and I like anarchists a whole lot better than I like Libertarians... of course, I like rabid weasels more than I like Libertarians.)