Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former chancellor of the exchequer who has taken to declaring that “green is the new red,” has followed a similar intellectual trajectory. Lawson takes great pride in having privatized key British assets, lowered taxes on the wealthy, and broken the power of large unions. But climate change creates, in his words, “a new license to intrude, to interfere and to regulate.” It must, he concludes, be a conspiracy—the classic teleological reversal of cause and effect.
