In an op ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal , Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus, decries "a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets." His target: "The Climate-Industrial Complex" of companies feeding off the government's handouts to corporations investing in technologies to reduce global warming or adapt to it. He revisits Eisenhower's presidential farewell warning of the odious influence of the military-industrial complex.

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. ...

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

Will governments try to entice food companies into wheedling taxpayer dollars to pay corporate development and marketing costs for low-sodium foods based on science that is even weaker than that adduced to support measures to combat global warming? That camel's-nose-under-the tent in the banking and auto industries is shaping up as a pattern to watch.

Nor is the parallel limited to a nutrition-industrial complex, Lomborg points out the tactic being employed by the Copenhagen Climate Council, representing "green" equity investors like Al Gore and industrial interests like wind turbine manufacturers, at the forthcoming World Business Summit on Climate Change where scientific skeptics have been excluded from the program. Kinda sounds like some controversy-deniers we know in the public health nutrition community.