Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey is not only delusional about healthcare, it turns out he’s also a first rate climate change denier.

Mackey upset many Whole Foods customers, employees and shareholders last summer with his Wall Street Journal op-ed trashing President Obama’s health care reform efforts.  Now he’s back with a new bone to pick – “hysteria about global warming,” will “raise taxes and increase regulation” and lead to “socialism.”  Boo!

Mackey, “a vocal libertarian, an orthodox free-marketer, an admirer of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Ayn Rand,” spoke candidly with The New Yorker’s Nick Paumgarten about his climate change denial.  Wacky Mackey reveals that one of the books on his nightstand is “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming—the Missing Science,” a skeptic screed authored by Australian climate denier (and director of three commercial mining companies) Ian Plimer. 

Health care reform seems a long way from climate change but they share something very important in common: well funded interest groups that want to keep things just the way they are.

Take the Manhattan Institute. They are railing against proposed health care reform, churning out a dizzying number of reports and op-eds about why “Obama-care” is wrong for America. They also expend abundant effort slagging climate science, last year feting Danish doubter Bjorn Lomborg. The Manhattan Institute received $235,000 from ExxonMobil, as well as funding from various other conservative organizations.

Or the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog that has received $257,500 from ExxonMobil, and regularly gripes about how biased the US media is towards the “theory” of climate change, or the need to overhaul the health care system.

Other groups working hard to derail Obama's health care platform include the notorious Heartland Institute. Desmog Blog readers will remember their remarkably unethical efforts to associate unwitting climate researchers with their propaganda campaign against climate science.