Well I think all of these anti-intellectual memes have some some ulterior biases and/or motivations underlying them. I'm speaking generally, not about every individual who shares the position or falls prey to the hype. There are always exceptions. But it's easy to see why a Christian might not want to accept evolution, or why a Nazi sympathizer might not want to accept the Holocaust and so on. With AGW deniers there seems to be a mix of motivations at play. The most banal being along the lines of "I trust conservatives more than liberals. Al Gore is a liberal. I like Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin and they say AGW is BS". Then we have the Alex Jonser "everything is a conspiracy and the government is out to get me" types who will latch on to anything. The third and final motivation I can see is from free market proponents who are against government regulation and recognize that AGW would be a good candidate for such a thing.
Indeed, and it's that politicization that's turned GW into such a highly-charged issue in the US, whereas much of the rest of the industrialized world has pretty much accepted its inevitability and instead constantly haggles to try to figure out something to do about it. The politicization of it in the US also gives developing nations and other groups a leg to stand on when it comes to refusing to adhere to any strategy for adjusting to the warming, and it's costing land viability already in India (and possibly China), as well as becoming a growing problem in Mexico and the southwestern US. The situation in the Mid-East is different since the land has been growing more arid over a long period of time, but the overall rise in global temperature has serious consequences there as well. The comparison to Creationists is quite apt in this context since this isn't some far-flung future prediction at all, and can be quantified today simply by looking at the Himalayas, the polar caps, and numerous regions within the equatorial region that are seeing the effects currently. As for the "free market" types, they've always been living a fantasy since the markets haven't been free (as in "do what you want") for a very long time anyway-- instead they're free as in "free to conduct business without breaking the law." I tend to think that the Alex Jones types are in a fringe minority, not unlike the bunker-builder militants during the Cold War who were trying to always be ready for a Red Dawn type situation.
To be honest, I didn't understand all of your reply. In terms of what motivated the initial campaign and the way they went about it I think tobacco/cancer well-poisoning is the best comparison and to some extent they were both carried out by the same people in the same way. This isn't a counter point really, just a comparison that might be more fitting. As to your question "who stands to gain", I would say free market proponents and specific industries (oil and tobacco).
You're right that it wasn't exactly a counterpoint. I was more excited to have some better feedback than the "yes, you're right" or the "OMG you just compared to the Nazis" responses that dominated the other posts, and didn't attribute it to what it actually was. It's still greatly appreciated, and precisely what I wanted to get in response.
Sure, the proponents you name certainly stand to benefit from maintaining a status quo, but I wouldn't consider that benefiting as a whole. There's little or no doubt that many of the current energy companies would jump on whole hog if the nation got past the politicized debate and started working on a solution instead of bickering over whether there's a problem in the first place. Oil companies already spend ridiculous amounts of resources trying to figure out how to more easily extract what oil can be found from the ground-- in Canada and parts of the US this is highly evident-- so switching gears to different power sources to jockey control over really wouldn't be all that different in terms of their operations. When a growing number of extraction processes are trying to convert sandy tar into useful oil and the cost of doing so is more than twice what it used to cost just drilling a well, it's safe to say that a company focused on actually drawing a profit instead of holding fast to a political ideology is going to lean toward profits. That's what played a role in the lack of movement on the EV1 (automobile) ten years ago, and not some consortium between auto and oil producers-- indeed, both the auto and oil industries would gladly leave the other in the dust of obsolescence if given half the chance at a profitable alternative. It's for reasons along those lines that I'm less concerned with the free market leaders as a huge obstacle in general, because the main driving principle there is always going to be profit-driven, and all that's desired regarding climate change is a mechanism to take advantage of for the free market.
I do think your comparison is good in that it highlights the political nature of the arguments, because I agree that there's a heavy element of that involved in this fight. It's a highly ideological debate going on, and certain political camps have dug their heels in to stick to their arguments instead of letting the data drive the debate (which is no surprise given the nature of ideology). Still, this also doesn't seem to be a situation where anything is to be gained, with the exception of populist backing politically-- and perhaps this is why it's such a popular canard among the most fervent ideological conservatives. But therein lies the anti-intellectualism component as well, since the denial arguments tend to revolve around incredulity at scientists and scientific fields-- note the earlier argument by mythstifieD that climatology was "young" as a science (which was untrue) and somehow that counting against the evidence that exists. In a meta analysis, this is in part why the politically conservative party in the US tends to be considered anti-science-- not that Republicans necessarily are, but the fact that arguments like Creationism and GW denial are so prevalent (in the party) tends to give that label some credence.
Where I don't think your comparison works is that those two cases (you brought up) weren't scientific or scholarly issues that found their way into the political sphere, but were actually created by the political sphere. Now, the smoking/cancer example does slightly defy that characterization, since there
was research concluding that smoking increases cancer risk in the medical fields for quite some time, but its becoming a debate was precipitated by the companies involved and not because the medical study had gotten to the point where it was disseminating widely to the public. The reason these differ from the GW issue is that GW didn't get a huge backlash from the CFC manufacturers in the 1980's and 90's-- though the research has had concerns as far back as the 1950's, at least, and grown from there-- and it didn't really become a hot-button political issue until Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" came out. However, a lot of the well-poisoning arguments had been in use prior to Gore's publication and subsequent film. I'm not so quick to set this firmly on the shoulders of political or pro-industry ideology, because both seem to have been dragged into the fight as the evidence has grown while the anti-intellectual nature of the denial arguments had already been present. Sure, with the political attachment to the debate the arguments have gotten louder, and with industry being thrown into the mix the debate has grown more complex, but neither of those things marked the beginning of the anti-intellectual movement denying global warming, and the anti-intellectualism involved goes back at least to the 1970's or early 1980's. While a possible argument could be made that Carter putting solar panels on the White House and Reagan taking them down marked a beginning of the political incursion, but that seems to me to be a post-hoc rationalization by political parties currently of an incident where Reagan was attempting to publicly and blatantly establish himself as a polar opposite to Carter (whose presidency was regarded as poor at the time due to the hostage crisis)-- frankly, it wasn't much of a big deal then in the context of GW and few people remembered it until brought up this last decade. Basically, while I think your two examples are good in that they represent parallels of what the climate change debate has merged into, I don't necessarily think they are better examples of parallels of the core anti-intellectualism I'm talking about overall.
