It seems you just can’t keep a good conspiracy theory down. The human mind seems to have an endless capacity to invent complex and sinister plots, particularly when there is ideology or stupidity involved.
Conspiracy theories are nearly as prevalent in the climate change debate as they were about JFK’s death. A group of Chinese scientists has come out saying that the sustainability movement is a rich world conspiracy, so that American companies can sell more renewable technology, or to keep poor countries poor be denying them the opportunities to develop the cheap but polluting industries that helped make the western world so wealthy during the industrial revolution.
An article in The Sydney Morning Herald on 8 October quotes Zhang Musheng, “one of China's most influential intellectuals and a close adviser to the People's Liberation Army” as saying that
global warming is a “bogus proposition”, and that it is an American ruse to sell green technology and improve its economy. So there - climate change is a capitalist plot.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, that hotbed of conspiracy theorists the Tea Party movement is claiming the exact opposite. According to chief Mad Hatter Tom DeWeese, president of the self-styled American Policy Center and one of the movement’s most prominent spokesmen, the whole sustainability movement is a leftist plot to destroy the American Way. Recently they’ve had a go at the innocuous Agenda 21, adopted by 178 governments at the first UN climate summit in Rio de Janeiro way back in 1992. The best summary I’ve seen is from the RNI (Republicans for the National Interest) website.
“Agenda 21 envisions local communities all across our nation adopting ‘comprehensive community plans’ that have as their real, though unstated, purpose the elimination of the very middle class quality of life, that has been the bedrock of our national independence and personal freedoms. In place of the suburb, it wants Soviet-style high density housing; changes in zoning laws that increasingly make it impossible to maintain single family residences (let alone build new ones); mandated use of public transportation … and severe limitations on private food, water, and energy consumption, in return for enormously high taxes that will fund cradle to grave care by the nanny government.”
So there - climate change is a communist plot. Or a capitalist one, take your pick. There is of course a third possibility. It just might be really happening.
