I suspect that his opinion is, much and in one way or another as are all systems of belief, a function of the extent to which language as abstraction has no fundamental need to anchor itself upon concrete facts to maintain tenure and solvency in any particular social or cultural context.
It is quite a simple matter to orchestrate reflexive self-validations for almost any economic or political position because faulty premises do not at all inhibit a person from constructing a relatively self-consistent edifice as leaning towers of unwitting misdirection.
Given the current parlous state of the global information environment we should be surprised that there are not in fact very many more such foundationally dissociative misrepresentations of the environmental state of affairs than actually do exist.
Observations and experience of human nature and the enduring financial value cultivated from atavistic as obsolescent world views leads me to predict that as the climate crisis deepens we can expect to see very many more such disconnects between belief and reality.
Worth noting, as well, that we are all susceptible to self-deception but that we might easily identify these grand strategic blunders as infantile narcissistic fantasies.
Daedelus Kite 