Here is a Paul Krugman column I saved about the question.

[b]Why Republicans Turned Against the Environment[/b]
Aug. 15, 2022, By Paul Krugman, Opinion Columnist

In 1990 Congress passed an amendment to the Clean Air Act of 1970, among other things taking action against acid rain, urban smog and ozone.

The legislation was highly successful, greatly reducing pollution at far lower cost than business interest groups had predicted. I sometimes see people trying to use acid rain as an example of environmental alarmism — hey, it was a big issue in the 1980s, but now hardly anyone talks about it. But the reason we don’t talk about it is that policy largely solved the problem.

What’s really striking from today’s perspective, however, is the fact that the 1990 legislation passed Congress with overwhelming, bipartisan majorities. Among those voting Yea was a first-term senator from Kentucky named Mitch McConnell.

That was then. This is now: The Inflation Reduction Act — which, despite its name, is mainly a climate bill with a side helping of health reform — didn’t receive a single Republican vote. Now, the I.R.A. isn’t a leftist plan to insert Big Government into everyone’s lives: It doesn’t coerce Americans into going green; it relies on subsidies to promote low-emission technologies, probably creating many new jobs. So why the scorched-earth G.O.P. opposition?

The immediate answer is that the Republican Party has turned strongly anti-environmental over time. But why?

Surveys from the Pew Research Center show the widening partisan divide over environmental policy. In the 1990s self-identified Republicans and Democrats weren’t that different in their environmental views: Republicans were less likely than Democrats to say that we should do whatever it takes to protect the environment, more likely to say that environmental regulation hurts the economy, but the gaps were relatively modest.

Since then, however, these gaps have widened into chasms, and not in a symmetrical way: Democrats have become somewhat more supportive of environmental action, but Republicans have become much less supportive.

Most of the divergence is fairly recent, having taken place since around 2008. I can’t help pointing out that Republican belief that environmental protection hurts the economy soared precisely during the period when revolutionary technological progress in renewable energy was making emissions reductions cheaper than ever before.

Republican voters may be taking their cues from politicians and media figures. So why have conservative opinion leaders turned anti-environment?

It’s not about belief in free markets and opposition to government intervention. One of the most striking aspects of recent energy disputes is the extent to which Republicans have tried to use the power of the state to promote polluting energy sources even when the private sector prefers alternatives. The Trump administration tried, unsuccessfully, to force electric utilities to keep burning coal even when other power sources were cheaper. Currently, as The Times has reported, many Republican state treasurers are trying to punish banks and other companies seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What about the cynical view that the G.O.P. is simply in the pocket of fossil fuel interests? Obviously money talks, and contributions from coal and, to a lesser extent, oil and gas do flow mainly to Republicans. But the Inflation Reduction Act — which will open up many business opportunities — was endorsed by a number of large corporations, including energy companies like BP and Shell. Republicans were unmoved.

What has happened, I’d argue, is that environmental policy has been caught up in the culture war — which is, in turn, largely driven by issues of race and ethnicity. This, I suspect, is why the partisan divide on the environment widened so much after America elected its first Black president.

One especially notable aspect of The Times’s investigative report on state treasurers’ punishing corporations seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions is the way these officials condemn such corporations as “woke.”

Wokeness normally means talking about racial and social justice. On the right — which is increasingly defined by attempts to limit the rights of Americans who aren’t straight white Christians — it has become a term of abuse. Teaching students about the role of racism in American history is bad because it’s woke. But so, apparently, are many other things, like Cracker Barrel offering meatless sausage and being concerned about climate change.

This may not make much sense intellectually, but you can see how it works emotionally. Who tends to worry about the environment? Often, people who also worry about social justice — either that, or global elites. (Climate science is very much a global enterprise.)

Even Republicans who have to know better won’t break with the party’s anti-science position. As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney had a decent environmental record; yet he joined every other Republican member of Congress in voting against the I.R.A.

What this means is that those people hoping for bipartisan efforts on climate are probably deluding themselves. Environmental protection is now part of the culture war, and neither policy details nor rational argument matters.

[sep][sep][sep]

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography.

They do, or can, see it; but do not want to.

Each will have his or her own reasons, but few if any say what those are. Instead they tend just to go on the offensive, calling climate change a hoax or lie.

Or they do not deny the climate is changing but attempt to use natural changes such as the Ice Age's fluctuations to explain it, [i]without[/i] understanding it.

However, I think two possible reasons for still trying to deny that something is happening and human actions are very much part of it, are -

- strong political or commercial interests,

- understandable fears of reductions in their own very comfortable, profligate private lives.

I wonder too, if some who flatly deny anthropogenic climate change might do so simply because they genuinely find anything scientific difficult to grasp; but rather than have the courage and honesty to seek explanations they [i]can [/i]comprehend, they try feebly to hide their ignorance by simply attacking science. (Very ironically too, if via the Internet.)

Well, you've now had over 200 replies and what they show is a bitter divide between those who do accept the climate is changing by or under human influence, and understand it; and people who not only do not believe it but will not try to understand it.


The idea is that it is some sort of "hoax" (i.e. a gigantic international lie by unidentified people for no discernible purpose and benefit) is untenable on simple logic.

Especially since many of those countries are otherwise generally hostile to each other, or at least self-centred, so hardly likely to co-operate in creating and maintaining a massive lie (the "hoax" as you say some call it). Lies are very hard to maintain even by individuals, and lies eventually break, so it would be impossible to create and maintain an enormous lie at State level even between friendly nations.

Calling such a lie a "hoax" is a bit euphemistic. A hoax is a lie by definition.

Instead, the increasingly weak lies are those of leaders and their followers of a very few, lone, isolationist governments who want to deny the fact and reasons for the climate's artificial changes, for purely personal or political/economic reasons.

.....

The reason for recognising we are changing the climate and trying to minimise the damage - which will be hard for us all - is obvious. The consequences of our ameliorating actions will not be easy or comfortable and I doubt anyone thinks they will be; but the consequences of inaction would be even worse.

The reasons some so desperately to keep calling it a "hoax" or "lie" are opaque, especially if they can only stoop to insults rather than honestly stating their rationale. Some seem genuinely confused by reading about palaeo-climates without really understanding the subject. Others perhaps realise the implications and (understandably) fear them so try to deny the fact as if that will make it go away. Still others may have political or other interests in denying anthropogenic climate-change - or even just climate-change.**


I think the major problem is that one or two major countries, but by no means all, have allowed the matter to become a very divisive but very shallow, domestic political spat whereas of course, it transcends all ideologies, creeds and cultures, and affects everyone on the planet. Otherwise, even in multi-party democracies, the matter is largely agreed across the board and the parties differ only on policy details.

...

What would happen if we carried on as if nothing is happening? Well apart from the large areas of the world becoming inhospitably arid and many coastal areas being inundated.... Eventually we will run out of coal and oil, but what do do then?

.....

We are the last major species to have evolved on Earth - our genus is only about 4M years old, our species <1M - yet has become the most dangerous and destructive of all animals, ultimately to ourselves. We won't destroy the planet (that "save the planet" slogan is plain silly), nor drive ourselves into extinction; but we are certainly heading for terrible times ahead, by our own acts.

We started to recognise the problems more than 100 years ago but have only just started to address them.. I think that was largely because much of the 20C clung to a naive assumption that Science and Engineering would solve everything. They could help us now, and are trying to; but not alone and [i]not[/i] as we had thought for about 200 years, by ever-bigger, ever-more, so increasing profligacy of exhaustible natural resources.

...

What would happen if we carried on as if nothing is happening?

Well apart from large areas of the world becoming inhospitably arid and many coastal low-lands becoming inundated, with dreadful social damage....

Eventually we will run out of coal and oil, and some metal ores, but what then?

Never mind, it will be for our descendants to face.

.........

*The geologists are studying evidence in sediments, ice-cores etc. of the Quaternary climate oscillations to establish what the climate did in the past couple of million years when Nature had it all to herself. This allows determining what we could expect if humanity had not spent the last couple of thousand years messing it up at an ever-increasing rate. And also what to expect as a result of our interference, on temperatures, ice-covers and sea-levels.


**Interestingly, a president of one major nation tried to deny man-made climate-change for direct, domestic political purposes; yet also hinted at wanting his nation to take over another country's Arctic territory that could well lose its ice-sheet by the climate warming. He was told "certainly not", of course; but it does not take much thinking to comprehend his duplicity.

It’s embarrassing that we’re still having this argument.

Carbon dioxide traps heat. We know this and have known this with absolute certainty for nearly eighty years now.

Anyone arguing against this is akin to flat earthers and people who think we faked the moon landings.

You’re not being a healthy skeptic; you’re denying the evidence of a proven observable fact.

The people who deny these facts simply don’t understand the science of it.

I once argued with someone who thought that NASA was faking the existence of black holes. I presented him several mathematical equations that were used in determining the existence of black holes and asked him to point out where the variables went wrong. And he didn’t know where to start.

And that’s the problem. They don’t believe in the issue because they refuse to understand the issue. You can’t educate people who don’t want to learn.

When Climate scientists said if we don't change and do something now then in 30 years it will be irreversible. And what did the world governments do? They waited 30 years before they did anything... That year in lockdown, saw an immediate improvement in the world, hard to deny that! And yet people still do... We deserve what happens to us.

The data says anthropogenic climate change is real. The data comes from temperature and atmospheric measurements covering 800,000 years (about 7 ice ages), recorded in glacial layers & sea floor sediments.

Here's a collection of points from an earlier discussion of climate change.

[quote]but I've yet to hear a rational explanation of how miniscule increases in an atmospheric trace gas such as CO2, causes the earth to warm.[/quote] It's because CO2 & methane are transparent to visible light but more opaque to infrared. The solar energy comes pouring in via the visible spectrum, but the heat can't leave so easily via the infrared spectrum due to that opacity. Kids' version:
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/explainer-co2-and-other-greenhouse-gases
idealized quantitative model: https://www.climate-policy-watcher.org/coriolis-force/a-simple-mathematical-model-of-the-greenhouse-effect.html

[quote] In order to actually prove human carbon emissions influence climate, all variables would have to remain constant[/quote] Nope. With multiple data points we can solve for multiple variables simultaneously. Detailed climate models account for all the variables you list and more. They are verified and calibrated based on 800,000 years of prior climate data.
http://web.mit.edu/globalchange/www/climate.html

[quote] Global warming models are based on small amounts of data. The earth is 4.6 billion years old, and we are expected to believe they can draw conclusions based on a hockey stick graph with 50 years of data?[/quote]
Nope, not 50 years, 800,000 years, covering about 7 ice ages. The climate data comes from bubbles in glacial ice, and is corroborated by data from lake & sea floor sediments.
https://icecores.org/about-ice-cores
CO2 & methane & temp data

Here's [i]where[/i] the various data sets were collected:

The most salient thing about the 800,000 years of climate data is the rate of change during those previous 7 ice ages compared to the current rate of change this century.

[quote] Where does the money for climate research come from?[/quote]
Fair question - it comes mostly from the National Science Foundation. Equally fair: where does the money for climate denial come from? The US oil industry makes about $110 [i]billion[/i] per year; coal another $20 billion. Big Oil spends $3.6 billion per year on advertising; a sum equal to about 8X the whole NSF climate budget. You're not naive enough to believe [i]none[/i] of that money goes to propaganda, are you?

There is no anthropogenic climate change

climate change is real. It was around long before humans even existed and will be a thing long after we are gone. Its narcissistic of certain people to think they can stop it in anyway and its now used for political agendas and that is a sure fire quick way to turn people far away from it

It is real, but lots of people are on here pushing all sorts of groundless conspiracy theories, like anti vax, 5G, chemtrails etc, while also shrieking that climate change is one vast conspiracy.

In fact, the real conspiracy is that companies have been covering up the effects of fossil fuels on climate for decades.

So about those frozen mammoths in Siberia. How rapid did the climate have to change for them to be flash frozen standing up with flowers in their mouth? Climate changes. Sometimes slowly over time and sometimes very rapidly. Sometimes the climate change lasts for a long time and sometimes it lasts a short time. What has never been proven or even indicated is that CO2 is a driver if climate change. We know by the vast amounts of coal and limestone that the levels of CO2 were much higher in the past than they are now and yet the earth did not overheat. Instead it went into an ice age. Very strange on the earth's part don't you think? AGW or ACC is a hoax designed to fool the gullible and destroy human lives.

Deniers isn't the right word. Try "distrusters" instead. We are the people who have learned to take what politicians, whether elected or nor, with a grain of salt. Our degree of distrust seems t go along with how insistent they are about what they say. The more insistent the more likely it's hot air. Also, look at who benefits from the path they are trying to redirect us to, and who suffers. And finally, the personal wealth accumulated by politicians over the course of their office suggest that what they say may be but a sales pitch to add to their own wealth.

From a practical standpoint, I don't believe they have accounted for all the variables that affect the earth we live on and seriously doubt that they can accurately compare today's earth with the earth of 25 years ago, or 100 years ago. There are so many lies they have backed away from that they first start with a conclusion, then try to make up a credible reason to support the conclusion. Like they tried to pass coastal areas sinking for sea level rising. Then it was icebergs melting, then it was thermal expansion.

Just think about it. The same government that was convinced that Solyndra was a wise place for the US government to fork over a half-billion dollars in taxpayers' money is the same government that insists that global warming cause by humans in America is established science.

No, they don't "think", and that's the problem.

Science is meant to be questioned but the powers that be, don't want that anymore, they just want control. I remember no one being allowed to question the "science" that revolved around COVID. Turns out, most of it was made up and/or hidden and silenced. Very few people question actual climate change, the climate never stops changing. What they question, is man's influence on it and how these ridiculous mandates the powers that be want to or have implemented would help it. So far, no one has answered that. If you want me to follow you, and if it's man-made, that question should be easily answered.

When anything conflicts with anyones world view, there is no evidence that will convince them otherwise.

This applies to whole civilizations. For even the Catholic Church denied the world was a sphere for over a thousand years. See the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes. Even the Greeks and afterwards the Romans didn't want to believe it.

The only way to convince anyone of anything is to repeat the evidence repeatedly and constantly in multiple ways.

This eventually even convinced the Catholic Church, a thousand years later.

And believe it or not there are still deniers! 2,200 years later!

@BohemianBoo Okay, so, if tomorrow there were zero carbon emissions, how would that affect the weather? How much would the temperature drop or rise? How long would it take to occur? Would we no longer have "extreme" weather? No more cat. 5 hurricanes or F-5 tornado's? Would weather suddenly become predictable? Or would it remain unpredictable? Al Gore and his "scientist's", predicated, after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, that worse was yet to come! They'll be more numerous and more powerful but guess what, it never happened! Oh, yeah, Al Gore is another leftist that became a millionaire off of climate change! And John Kerry and Barrack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton and yes, the people at NASA! They were literally funded by the left to manipulate data to prove it exists! You're not from the US?

Insurance companies don’t think it’s a hoax. Here in Florida, companies are dropping customers like hot turds.

I don't know. I remember first reading about it in the late 1980s. The problem is that the change happens slowly enough that it's hard to remember what is "normal", and then perturbations are easy to explain away.

But last year was unprecedented in warmth - by a long shot - nearly everywhere. I'm surprised more people have not changed their tune over the last year. If this summer is just as bad, what then? Perhaps some city like Miami or Venice needs to go under water first?

The Anthropocene - a geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth's landscape, ecosystems, and climate - has been around as a concept for a generation or more. To my mind it is by far the most convincing explanation of current climatic instability.

@BohemianBoo You are insane! How many Cat. 5 hurricanes have hit the US since 2005, compared to the previous twenty years? How many F-5 Tornado's have hit the US since 2005 compared to the previous twenty years? Seriously, do you even Google(another Silicon Valley Corporation that donates millions to democrat's)to get the truth or just look up the Dems talking points?

No-one in their right mind thinks climate change is a hoax. The historical facts are clear enough. But lots of people in their right mind think, or rather know, that it is impossible to predict with certainty how climate change will develop in future.

Since the USA is going to go by the UN climate change mandates that fine, but what about Russia, Japan, Iran, India, Pakistan, (every country that ends with stan) China. Would they follow the same mandates? Can the USA alone make a difference? We also need better options that wind and solar. Solar panels are at best 30% efficient. Nuclear plants are an evil word in the USA but it is green and safe if PROPERLY maintained (expensive too) , all the disasters were a result in poor Maintenace or bad PR (three-mile island) so do I believe in it, yeah we still will at need petroleum for pharmaceutical needs, but since the United States gets that from China it's no big deal.

@memakingfriends i agree wit what you say how people cannot say climate change is not happening i have no idea how they can so blind and ignorant too be fair

Define climate change

Lol. Just another thing to blame the people on and of course the only solution is more taxes. Rinse repeat.

Please explain that Greenland was once ice free during 9th-10th centuries

We know it a hoax. No one can say what temperature we should aim for

They've been systematically trained, by the oil companies, their cohorts and political partners, to fight against the very thing that is hurting them. It's no different than what we saw around Covid. Science as a whole has been turned in to an enemy so climate change is discounted because it "belongs" to the enemy.

Geo engineering

The rich and powerful deny it for economic reasons. Conservatards deny it for culture reasons.

[media=https://youtu.be/s2oGUbsMrD4]

The same people burned so many "witches" that mainly only men survived. A few women.

climate change is now a prfit making policy so govt will soon allbe invlved

How do you not see that the ones pushing climate change are pushing this agenda!

Ffs 🤦🏼‍♀️

Humans are causing that bad weathers some how

It is true as I can see it.

Oh..it's real alright. There are signs all around us. Let's not kid ourselves and deny it. Besides, we are 8 billion and counting. That's a lot of people. It's bound to affect the earth and our precious resources. I pity the generations to come.

It's not climate change that deniers have issues with, it's the alleged man-made cause of climate change that have deniers pushing back on the issue of climate change.

As a global society, we seem to believe that the over-use of carbon fuels over the past 100 years is what's causing climate change to occur now. The truth is, the Ice Age was caused by unprecedented volcanic eruptions around the globe which blocked the sunlight from entering the earth's Troposphere which is the earth's lowest atmosphere.

This action alone pretty much shut down life on earth as earth's inhabitants had otherwise come to enjoy it at the time. The burning of fossil fuels over the past 100 years will no more cause volcanic eruptions to occur anymore than the burning of fossil fuels will be the root cause of tornados forming during untraditional seasons throughout the year.

The world is not switching to electric cars to reverse the effects of climate change; the world is switching to electric cars because most known oil reserves will be depleted before the end of this current century.

Any oil that is currently being discovered is very difficult to extract from the earth compared to how easy it otherwise was to extract in the mid-1970's which marked the peak of global oil consumption and the historic time of 'easy oil'.

If they're xtian show them this.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/mercynotsacrifice/2013/05/26/the-fate-of-those-who-destroy-the-earth-revelation-1118/