Edit Note: This post was improperly threaded by wiki. It belongs after TB's post of 11:16 PST.

"Conspiracy" is not a trick phrase designed just to victimize you. Groups working towards the same goal do not necessarily imply secret meetings and coded messages pinned to lamposts in the middle of the night. It doesn't even imply they are cooperating and coordinating their activities as you are suggesting.

Your spending comparisons are deliciously misleading, too. You are comparing the mere millions Exxon spends on propaganda with the billions spent by the government on their whole program. Apples and oranges, a rhetorical trick you seem to have mastered. Perhaps if you compared the business community's anti-AGW publicity budget with the Fed's pro-AGW publicity spending the comparison might be more meaningful. I have no idea what it is, but it isn't three orders of magnitude.

And I'm sure the best comparison would be how much the private sector stands to lose if a serious AGW program is put in place. Now we're talking billions. That's all the motive anyone needs to do whatever it takes to stop it. I'm much more able to understand actions taken by an existing dedicated team of PR pros serving an entire industry to prevent an attack than I am to cavalierly think it equivalent to a still undesignated shadow bureaucracy to mount one.

Industry 's (not just Exxon) opposition to AGW is based on proven losses they willl suffer if major changes are made in the energy business. You cannot compare this to the potential pork and graft which might occur in the regulatory process, which hasn't even been properly mapped out yet because the agencies that will administer these proposed programs have not even been conceived of yet, much less organized into a coherent lobby. The government axis of evil hasn't had the years of experience and preparation in place the private one has, and they don't have the organization or the plan or the leadership. And they certainly don't have the funding, at least not yet.

I know it makes you feel better to hypothesize this preposterous hidden conspiracy (oops, I've said it again!) because it helps distract from the very real and open "conspiracy" on the other side that has supported industry policies since way before AGW was ever an issue. That is their job, by the way: supporting industry's position. They get paid to do that, do you really expect them to do anything different?

So the response is still sneers, and well deserved ones; your implications and accusations are about as convincing as those breathless denunciations of evil NASA scientists who are determined to hide the truth from us about the Face on Mars.

P.S. As for my aggreeing with you on parts of your post, of course. My opinions and and ideas are not predicated on the proposition that everything you say or think must be dead wrong in every detail. Actually I agree with a lot of your positions, perhaps most of them. I'm just not as extreme about them as you are. I don't have to swallow your whole line unquestioningly to find common ground with it.