Here is a short excerpt from Ronald Bailey’s commentary on Pope Francis and Naomi Klein:

In her 2014 screed, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Klein asserted that climate science has given progressives “the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism” ever. She added that progressive values and policies are “currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature.”

You could not ask for a clearer instance of muddled thinking. When has any legitimate scientist wanted to harness research to a political agenda? To turn the question around, when has any legitimate leader wanted to harness a political agenda to scientific research? Each project pollutes the other.

Naomi Klein and many others make climate change a key driver of public policy, to argue as forcefully as they can: “Climate change demands action. We must all respond to this mandate, to change the way we live. Moreover, we must use state power to accomplish these changes.”

Why do they not see the unhappy alliance between science and politics that results from thinking this way? Structures and purposes of scientific thought differ so markedly from those of political thought, any careful thinker would take care to preserve one sphere’s independence from the other. Yet Naomi Klein, and Pope Francis, indefensibly bring political thought and scientific thought together in the same arena.

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