Ben Stein thinks environmental activists are secretly jealous of the “well-endowed power and manhood” of oil men.

Today’s Cavuto on Business opened with a clip of Hillary Rodham Clinton clashing with a Greenpeace activist over donations from the fossil fuels industry. Stein rushed to the defense of big oil and fossil fuels – and to smear those who disagree.

STEIN: Look, big oil is us. Big oil is our friends, it’s our neighbors, they’re the people that make our cars go, they’re the people who heat our houses in the winter and cool our houses in the summer. They are us. America is in very large measure dependent on oil and other fossil fuels.

Why this hatred of the fossil fuel companies I don’t know. There’s something deeply sick and psychologically awful about it. I think it has to with the envy of the intellectual chattering class at their computer keyboards with what they see as the cowboy riding the range free…

Later, Stein doubled down.

STEIN: There’s something deeply psychological – I’ve seen these people on the west side of L.A., all around me. They hate and envy the oil men. They have tremendous envy of what they see as their well-endowed power and manhood. They are scared of that. That’s what I hear.

In fact, there’s plenty of scientific evidence that fossil fuels are bad for the environment. But Fox helped cast doubt on that by framing the subject as a matter of partisan debate – and allowing a panelist to smear the environmentalists he disagrees with.

Watch it below, from the April 2 Cavuto on Business.