Interstate Highway system, immunization for polio and other diseases. Old people like Medicare. Bin laden was killed by your government, but not the GOP. O f course, 9 of the last 10 recessions were under GOP administrations so your uneasiness around republicans is understandable. They can't add.
So businesses should be trusted to take care of global warming for us ? Just like they did to get us here. Sure. Dream on.
Well, where is more opportunity? If you're a researcher, working on grants to tell the government whether or not they need to do something about x, you don't stand to gain much from telling them that they don't. You would be throwing away an opportunity to tell them, not only that they need to do something about x, but what they need to do about it, and, since you're such good friends, you'd be happy to handle one of the contracts they're about to start handing out. You think big businesses like oil or car companies will suffer from regulatory measures taken as a result of political victories on this? This has been going on for at least half a century. Do they look like they're hurting? Regulations always benefit larger companies over smaller ones because, the bigger they are, the easier it is to withstand the financial weight of the regulations. Not only does it not hurt them, they gain market share when their competition is trimmed. Half the time, they end up selling bigger or more products after the regulations, and the other half, they write the regulations themselves. What are the opportunities for what the winning side of this propaganda onslaught are calling "deniers"?
Even when those funding the research want global warming to be wrong, the science forces them to find otherwise. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jul/29/climate-change-sceptics-change-mind Besides, proper research grants are not awarded for questions that have already been answered or to people who think they already know the answer. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/Proposal.html
I pointed out one way in which financial incentives are aligned so as to bring more people down on one side of the dispute. You're not suggesting that we should ignore the incentive structure because some scientists have changed their minds on the issue, are you?
I'm telling you that there is no incentive to give people money for answers they already have. If you're a research scientist looking to make some money, climate science isn't the field you want to be in.
