Maybe oil companies were not conspiring to hide climate change data in the past, but the Republican Party is conspiring to hide it today.

As people debate the past as to whether there was a conspiracy of fossil fuel companies to deny evidence of climate change, the bigger issue is today. Large segments of the Republican Party are saying "climate change is a hoax."

It's debatable if there was conspiracy, or just human nature's natural avoidance of inconvenience that drove the past, but today, the denial on the part of many Republicans is much more obvious.

Some folks will say, and have said in the past, that we should not rely on government incentives toward green energy, but instead rely more on personal choice to work. That does make some sense, but it seems like recently there is more blatant disregard for doing anything about climate change among Republicans.

I miss the days when people said that we should not panic about climate change, but we still need to address it by relying more on market forces and technological innovation.

Today, the rhetoric is more that climate change is a hoax. This is a harsher stance than even conservatives took in the past, for instance during George W. Bush's administration.

Populism more in denial than corporatism.