Climate change deniers like to style themselves as latter-day Copernicuses and Galileos , lone visionaries bucking the established wisdom of the ages embodied back then in the teachings of the Catholic Church. There is a certain appeal to imagining oneself as isolated and embattled but unbowed. The analogy, however, is specious on its face. For neither Copernicus nor Galileo had giant international oil and coal companies supporting them with tens of millions of dollars of annual public relations expenditures and scores of fake think tanks which would have provided them comfortable and profitable sinecures while shielding them from the attacks of the church. No, the climate change deniers actually work for the established church of our age, wealthy corporate interests opposed to doing anything to mitigate the ongoing carnage of climate change–the very interests that continue to have a stranglehold on the legislative bodies of the world to such […]