The Monkton Puzzle - Freedom and Climate

Laird Monkton has been making a good living from promoting the denial of climate change. He is often booked as a speaker by denial-fests and free-market loops worldwide. So what is his appeal to the small but vocal group of people that come to see him? Simple; freedom. Monkton promotes climate change as a communist plot and part of a nefarious Fu-Manchu like scheme of global government. He casts himself as the freedom fighter - using his non-science education in Latin to unravel the complex science of global warming. He fights against government intrusion and for the little guy.

But it was not always so. Back the in 80s when AIDS first appeared, Monkton - then inside the corridors of power - was happy to use fear as a weapon. He promoted the solution to AIDS; global mass quarantine;

"there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month ... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently." This would involve isolating between 1.5 and 3 million people in the United States ("not altogether impossible") and another 30,000 people in the UK ("not insuperably difficult").

Wow - imagine the global legal powers you'd need to enforce a mass program of testing and quarantine? You'd need global treaties dis-empowering each individual person on the planet and subordinating them to an enforced programme of medical testing. You'd need to build loads of internment camps worldwide (of the kind conspiracy theorists love talking about) and the like. Imagine the cost of this? It would be an astronomical cost, I would guess dwarfing the cost of mitigating climate change.

Not only that - I can't see how it would ever work. You'd need 100% accuracy in the testing to contain it. Human error would ensure that would not happen if nothing else. People would resist as internment is the consequences of getting caught out... It would be a total disaster.

So only a few years ago, our brave freedom fighter was proposing an unworkable global testing and quarantine system for AIDS and now we're supposed to see him as a freedom fighter against global treaties of climate change.

Give me a break. He's a snake-oil selling knob-head making a fortune from scientifically illiterate, idealogical blinded punters and promoting the interests of far-right free-market ideology.

He's not a freedom fighter, he's an enemy of reason.