How bad ideas gain currency

I couldn't resist putting these two quotes together. 

First, (via Gus Van Horn) an explanation of how bad ideas gain currency:

"[Immanuel] Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyse a reader's critical faculty -- a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable -- all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence the 'Critique of Pure Reason'." (Ayn Rand, from her 'Untitled Letter,' in which she argues John Rawls applies a similar technique)

Second, Roger Pielke Jr.'s description of climate policy:

Climate policy focused on reducing emissions often looks like a Rube Goldberg device, with complexity built upon complexity such that policy levers may or may not impact the intended outcome — which is reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels all the way to net-zero.

I'll leave you to make the link.