Bill Frezza of the Competitive Enterprise Institute asks in a Daily Caller column: Why can’t progressives just admit victory and move on?

As American progressivism enters its second century, its adherents have become so addicted to struggle and so oblivious to the real problems facing contemporary society that they are endangering the very victories their forebears fought so hard to win. Nowhere is this more evident than in the environmental field.

I thought about this recently, when I was surrounded at a cocktail party by some eco-socialists shocked at my skepticism of “alternative energy” technologies. It didn’t seem to matter to them how many taxpayer-subsidized, government-mandated, not-ready-for-prime-time science experiments blow up on the launch pad. They are sure, they told me, that these technologies can be made to work simply because they must be made to work, and because without them we’ll soon be facing the end of the world.

I felt a bit like a heathen surrounded by Pentecostal missionaries demanding I renounce Satan. Attempts to engage in factual debate generally ended quickly when they confessed that, well, they weren’t scientists or engineers themselves so they don’t really understand the details.

I wish I could say my night was atypical, but that hardly seems to be the case.

Not satisfied with a string of successes that truly made America a cleaner and healthier place, environmentalists are now chasing phantom climate calamities that may or may not affect us decades or even centuries in the future, while insisting on remedies that would unleash real economic catastrophe today. And even by their own reckoning, the remedies they demand would do little or nothing to solve the very problem they are meant to address.

Climate zealots claim to have science on their side, yet the fervor with which they try to stamp out questioning, skepticism, and dissent can only be described as religious. Relying on climate models that have yet to successfully predict the future or even explain the past, they declare the science “settled” and demonize skeptics with comparisons to Holocaust deniers. Meanwhile, they have blinded themselves to the depredations of crony capitalists who are looting the public treasury while paying lip service to green causes.

Forums like this one attempt to cure the selective blindness.