I think it's because climate change is used as a formal issue disguising the actual desire of acquiring power. It's being used to legitimize power acquisition and force and is often full of things that won't actually make a difference.
I mean that climate change gets used as a boogeyman to try and advance political agendas (often anti-capitalist, more often, capitalism taking advantage of fear). If there was a good solution they zeroed our carbon emissions, climate change couldn't be held over people as a threat to convince them to do stuff anymore
It seems like there is a quasi-religious fervor around "climate change" and many are using it as a reason to remake the world in their desired fashion. People can both recognize the validity of climate science -- the planet is getting warmer -- and oppose the political "remedies" being cooked up.
I will say this: The opposition wants you to think that and to spread it to others. They mean to look implacable - not a novel negotiating strategy, if you think of it.
I think if we got disarmed their narrative of power and implacability, and realized our own power, the issue would be settled promptly. The truth is, most Americans are concerned about climate change and have been for awhile.
Corrupt politicians will find that using environmental concerns and climate change gives them the proper motivation to say "we need more control and the common man needs fewer freedoms". This is why it's a political issue.
Don't expect masses of people to gobble up the idea that climate change is going to ruin the planet when the motivating factor for a good portion of the people selling the idea is that they can seize more control.
It's no different than terrorism and things like the Patriot Act. Terrorism is a horrible problem and no one wants armed rebels chopping people's heads off in the streets of our cities. But when politicians start their backroom meetings and connive a way to start chipping away at our freedoms and our privacy (I'm being redundant), you start finding terrorism skeptics.
We have to find the proper balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the community. But all the while the entity that sits between the community and the individual, government, is taking more and more control. And they seem to let no opportunity to do so pass.
Climate change is one of their new, favorite vehicles.
Certainly true but decidedly not unusual. To the degree I'm a climate change skeptic it's largely because everyone seems to be using it as a stick to beat some political horse.
See it's stuff like this that makes me suspect that the climate change debate is more about virtue signaling than any actual threat. Because really if we honestly believed that the earth was warming because of carbon and that this presented a serious threat to the planet, we wouldn't be like "oh well fairness dictates that we let some countries keep emitting high levels of carbon." That consideration wouldn't even come up in a situation where we were faced with a serious planetary threat.
The only reason that this is even coming up is because climate change proponents, deep inside, believe that there will be no serious adverse consequences from climate change.
People want to use the specter of climate change to play politics and advocate radical socialism instead of solving a technical problem. We could easily go nuclear, sequester carbon, mitigate what changes we can't stop. But that doesn't address anyone's political aims, so instead we have a silly proxy argument between people pretending climate change isn't real and people demanding that other people sacrifice lifestyle and embrace their politics. Until we get past that and address the real issues, nothing will change.
That's because politics has consumed climate change and made it its own.
I find it really disturbing that so much of (American) politics today is a debate over facts. Politics should be about debating priorities and principles and approaches based on commonly accepted facts.
At this point I think we just need to accept, that every issue of every severity is widely used by parties, who know how to benefit from it. It doesn't actually prove or disprove the issue (and its severity itself).
For example: climate change is heavily used by people who know how to gain power by fighting it. It doesn't disprove the issue itself.
All effective strategies includes natural forces, because it is very difficult to fight against them. So no wonder why climate change (as being a massive natural force) is used by people in power for their benefit.
I think when people express concern over climate change denial, the concern usually isn't over the fact that climate change denial is physically and legally possible. The concern is usually more about the consequences of denial and the fact that denial seems to have a disproportionate influence over political outcomes.
It's not just that. There's a religious component to it (only God can alter the Earth so dramatically, or Jesus is returning soon so it doesn't matter, or similar) as well as an ideological component (mitigating climate change can't be done with laissez-faire approaches).
At this point, it's self-reinforcing. One of our two major political parties has climate change denial as a fundamental part of its identity. Lots of people vote for that party because they share that belief. Those who benefit from that party's success are then motivated to spread that belief even further just to recruit more voters to the cause. And as that belief solidifies among their voters, the party becomes unable to change its position no matter how convincing the facts become.
That's a failure of the political class who are using it to score points at the expense of a lot of people's lives.
It's really quite gross.
Climate change is due to, and a threat to, the status quo, and those who have gained their societal positions on the back of this status quo will defend the righteousness of their status literally to the death.
And these folks typically have communication platforms that reach a long way and therefore muddy the waters, often with the sideline cheering of said politicians.
They're politically invested against action taken to mitigate climate change, and the best way to push those policies is to convince people that climate change isn't important and the people who say it's important are either idiots or lying.
Maybe because there's a scientific consensus at least on the fact that there's a global warming at the source of a ever growing climate instability and that the only people pushing against it are crazy people who don't know what they are talking about and crazy politicians willing to say that out loud in order to get elected, and coal/oil/gas lobbies paying for sham science (and aforementioned politicians) to say the contrary.
Funny by the way how the discourse about climate change has changed over the years from "It's not happening" to "It's not that bad". Altough in typical conspiracist style, some have always held both at the same time.
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