The Wall Street Journal's news content is the equal of any newspaper in America. The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page is a den of right wing groupthink and delusion unsurpassed in its potential to embarrass the non-lunatics at the paper.

Every paper's op-ed page is supposed to be a forum for a wide variety of ideas, of course, but the Journal is sure to seek out and publish the most thoroughly discredited dead-ender right wing ideas possible, as part of its mission to give a veneer of mainstream respectability to positions that would otherwise not be polite topics of conversation on the Sunday talk shows. Today's entry: Paul Tice (who "works in investment management and is a former Wall Street energy-research analyst," so) argues that colleges and universities are doing a horrible disservice to students by teaching them that global warming is bad and to be feared, instead of just teaching them to be highly paid petroleum engineers. Why all the thinking about the future of human survival, colleges and universities?

Obviously, having proponents of man-made-climate-change theory running energy-research institutes at the college level is an example of inmates taking over the asylum, but there is method to this madness. Over the past 25 years, the environmental movement has been very successful using a two-pronged approach to push its anti-fossil-fuel agenda.

The first prong involves leveraging the U.S. courts and executive agencies to directly control the oil and gas industry through government regulation and taxation. The second involves indirect control through thought leadership and opinion-shaping. Culturally and generationally, man-made climate change is becoming accepted wisdom due to the steady indoctrination taking place in our universities.

Here we have a guy who works in finance arguing against commonly accepted scientific facts and then calling the practice of teaching commonly accepted scientific facts at universities "indoctrination," like some 1950s B-movie government bureaucrat character. This is then published on the opinion page of one of the entire world's most respected news organs, because the rich people who own that news organ happen to hold decrepit old opinions of their own.

It's funny how things work.

[Photo: AP]