Of the army of extremely online conservative types who spend their days fantasizing about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making an on-camera mistake, Ben Shapiro is perhaps the thirstiest of them all. In August, Shapiro became seized by the notion that he should challenge the soon-to-be-congresswoman to a debate, offering to donate $10,000 to a charity of her choice. Ocasio-Cortez, who was in the midst of a campaign that left her little time to deal with, essentially, Hail Mary-prom invitations from YouTube personalities, ignored him. This, in itself, was treated as a victory-by-forfeit for Shapiro, once hailed by the New York Times as "the cool kids' philosopher"—a man so preternaturally skilled in the art of persuasion that the progressive movement's favorite daughter was too afraid to even tweet back.

Last year, during one of the many TED Talk-style addresses that he travels the country to deliver, Shapiro held court on the issue of climate science. (A clip of it is making the rounds this morning, for good reason.) His argument is not that climatologists who warn of the dangers of global warming are wrong; he concedes that they are "probably" right. Instead, he contends that "the left" has posited no simple, consensus plan to address the astonishingly complex problem of climate change, and that it is therefore imprudent—premature, at least—to discuss possible solutions as we "wait for the evidence to come in."

This characterization is, to put it politely, very generous to the mainstream Republican view of climate change, which is far closer to outright denial than it is to the cautious, fact-gathering approach for which he advocates. But Shapiro's conclusion also ignores the obvious possibility that if conservatives were to take the scientific evidence of global warming as seriously as everyone else, a mutually acceptable solution—the absence of which he takes takes for granted—might have the chance to emerge. In fact, Democrats have spent decades stumping for policy proposals, some modest and some ambitious, aimed at mitigating the deleterious effects of carbon emissions. Shapiro's reasoning only works because he and his ilk have spent decades pretending that such proposals don't exist.

From there, he winds up to deliver the made-for-virality part of his outline: Even if global warming happens, Shapiro asks dramatically, and even if its effects as as disastrous as predicted, aren't rational, free-market actors already equipped with the tools to deal with it?