The Truth Matters Less Than Who's Saying It

Ron Bailey moves toward the middle on global warming, and some commenters at Reason Hit&Run go batshit. Art, for example, wrote:

You have me very worried. You keep falling into these eco-socialist and tranhumanist indoctrination camps. You're not being critical or informed about the so called "Truth." You are doing nothing more than complaining about the color of Al's tie, while buying into their nonsense that simply cloaks the desire of the ecosocialists to control people and resources while producing nothing.

As I responded,

Art engages in the same tactic Al Gore is accused of, but from the opposite direction: worrying about whose hands an argument plays into, rather than whether it's backed up by the facts. Questions of truth take a second place to the need to stonewall on acknowledging any fact that "the enemy" might benefit from. It doesn't matter whether something is true or not, if it's something the eco-socialists agree with.

Believe it or not, Art, statism does not inevitably follow from the acknowledgment that human activity may be significantly increasing mean temperatures. The fact that you assume it does demonstrates that you have assumptions in common with many of the "eco-socialists": that existing economic trends result from the free market, and that state intervention is necessary to counter them.

In fact, just the opposite is true. The government needs to stop subsidizing the consumption of energy and transportation, so that the full cost of transportation is reflected in its price, and the full cost of shipping goods long distance is internalized in their price. If such government intervention were eliminated, we might be buying stuff made in efficient small factories 20 miles away instead of huge factories 1000 miles away, or buying produce grown close to home instead of from factory farms with subsidized irrigation water in California. We might be living closer to where we shop and work, instead of maintaining two separate communities for living and working, each with its own utility grid, and commuting back and forth between them.

The free market is the solution, not the problem.