> why isn’t some billionaire using subversive techniques to manipulate the population into doing something?

Maybe there is selection bias, where only borderline (at least) psychopaths seeking individual profit and power become billionaires.

Also, I think the steel-man of the conservative position isn't that AGW doesn't exist (it clearly does), but that economic damage from over-reaction is actually a bigger threat and cost than adaptation will be. They just focus on fuzzing over the science since that is much easier to sell than what they really believe, which I think is actually more like "We just don't care much about animals, and what we're doing is about comparable to effect to what our species did when we invented the automobile and air travel and paved the earth. This is progress, deal with it."