About my criticism of celebrity climate activism, Jonathan Chait writes: “Conservatives who don’t want to actively defend their parties [sic] denialist stance on climate change just keep finding ways to change the subject to resentment of liberals.”

This is a peculiar thing to write. As anybody who reads my work knows, I am not a member of the Republican party nor much inclined to “actively defend” it when it is wrong, as indeed I believe it is broadly wrong about climate change and especially wrong in its often conspiratorial account of the issue—as attested to in the very piece Chait references. And lots of others.


I’m the guy who is friendly to “a modest carbon tax in exchange for meaningful entitlement reform and broader rationalization of the tax regime” based on a risk-mitigation approach to the issue of climate change. Those are my words, published right here in this very public forum, available free of charge, even to incurious cretins.

I assume that as a matter of ordinary editorial standards writers for New York magazine are expected to read articles they write about, so I can only assume this is intentional intellectual dishonesty, which of course would be expected of Chait, as that is his business.