Of COURSE he has an ideological axe to grind. So did Thomas Jefferson. And so do the radical environmentalists who are pushing this stuff.

Today the leadership of the environmental movement has become a haven for Marxists who had nowhere else to go after communism's failures as a normal political movement. After it became obvious that socialism was not going to provide a wealthy, advanced lifestyle for its citizens (which, if anyone remembers the fifties and sixties, was how it was sold in Russia and China), the approach changed.

Gone were the posters showing the giant smokestacks and power lines that Socialist Man would spread across the Earth (they spread something all right--the worst environmental ruin ever to happen on this planet occurred in socialist countries)

The commissars have shut up, and the radical environmentalists have come forward. We are now to be ruled by the Proletariat of the Rain Forests. The goal is still the same: enslavement of the individual to the state.

If you have been paying any attention at all, you might have noticed that the solutions presented to any and all environmental problems ALWAYS involve vastly increasing the power of a central government authority and reducing individual liberty. Go ahead, give me ANY example which is an exception to this.

This is further confirmed when free-market and/or advanced technological solutions are put forth to solve environmental problems without crippling individual choice and the desire to live a comfortable, affluent life.

The response to such solutions by radical environmentalists is virulent opposition. The best example of this was the response they had back in the '80s when cold fusion still looked like it might have something to it. In an article (LA Times original not available), environmental leaders were actually angry that humanity might have discovered a cheap, clean source of energy.

I could dump documents on you all day long backing this up. Most of it would be wasted time, mine and yours, as these people couch their totalitarian ideas in gigantic masses of vaporous rhetoric. The United Nations Agenda 21 is a good example of this. Read it if you want. I've plowed through enough of this stuff to confirm what I knew already.

Now, as to the big AHA! when discovering that Evil Corporations may have funded the Cato Institute. Well, we all know that things funded by voluntary donations are not as pure and above reproach as research funded by wealth confiscated by armed force. Still, did it ever occur to you that government-funded studies might have an ulterior motive? Maybe not profits, but political power? Why are people automatically skeptical of any viewpoint put forth by a private entity, but swallow anything a government tells them?