Why the conservative anger over climate change

I live in a red state in the deep south, and I’ve been worrying over a question for a while now: why are conservatives so angry about the concept of climate change?

I’ve asked a couple of family members why it bothers them so much that there could be a such thing, but the answers I get just aren’t logical. Usually it’s something along the lines of “it’s just a scheme to get a bunch of scientists rich” (which I counter with the fact that oil and coal are pretty good schemes for getting rich, and they’re paying A LOT for those without questioning) and “God is in control” (which, again, doesn’t really make sense; biblically, I see no reason to believe God wouldn’t allow us to heat up the earth).

There’s a similar theme with race and guns, but those are more tangible and it’s clearly an anger fueled by ignorance and fear. Generally, people are ignorant about the science of climate change, but why so angry? Is it really the frustration of trying desperately to NOT believe something and having to confront it regularly? Are they secretly terrified?

Has anyone else encountered this phenomenon? Seriously, I’ve nearly been punched in the face for insinuating that one particularly cold day in winter doesn’t rule out the possibility of global warming.

Your post is so loaded and biased and smug and condescending, I can see why people might get angry when you try to educate the poor, unsophisticated rubes.

They’ve drunk the Flavr-Aid handed out by politicians and right-wing media who are bought and paid for by oil companies and polluting manufacturers, and who have managed to turn “science” into something to be mocked. It’s why another segment of our society thinks vaccines cause autism, people rode dinosaurs, and the earth is only 6,000 years old.

This oversimple OP requires an oversimple response.

If climate change exists, a lot of left wing ideas/programs are needed - renewable energy, carbon taxes, fuel efficient cars, reduction of urban sprawl, etc.

These sorts of things really cut against the grain of right wing thinking. Generally, more rules and less freedom. That’s what’s at the root of all the opposition.

With climate change being true then either there are going to be restrictions on the way people live and/or it is going to cost money to deal with it. Conservatives react very negative to both of these.

I don’t buy that avoiding climate change is costly. It’s far less costly than than the effects of climate change. Both are long term.

My notes:

  1. There’s an overall anti-Science bias in certain groups. (Not all conservative.) If you tell them the Moon causes the tides, they will laugh and point at you. Facts don’t matter.

  2. The current economic model is make money now!. Forget next quarter, next year, next decade. Make your profit target for this quarter. Taking action on something like climate change is outside that mental model.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that this is exactly the reason. The weather has always been considered to be God-directed – it’s one of the primary things that people point to when invoking God’s control over the world (“Pray for rain”). In the eyes of true believers, man-made things like buildings and governments may not be directly managed by God, but nature, including the weather, is. We’ve all heard the comments after weather disasters specifically attributing them to God’s decision to punish people.

Anthropomorphic climate change requires a fundamental shift in the way people view the world – God is not making the weather, we are. Blaming humans for climate change is taking one of the most basic elements of God’s power away from God. It seems to me that deep down, a lot of the emotional denial of climate change comes down to this: We don’t make the weather, God does. By denying God’s agency, you’re denying God.

Close, but more like:
“These sorts of things really cut… into the profits of big Oil, who are huge supports of the GOP to keep things the way they are (and damn the consequences)”

It’s actually pretty easy to figure out what motivates the GOP: follow the money. For a given change, who does it impact (negatively as far as profits) ? Acknowledging and actually taking steps to address climate change would impact big Oil. Period. Since they can’t admit/acknowledge this, they then need to make up excuses like not believing the science, and/or finding one, crackpot dissenting opinion.

Maybe they are annoyed. Annoyance is a legitimate reason for anger. I am a conservative, but I believe in climate change though.

It’s the First Rule of Acquisition: Once you’ve got their money, never give it back. Scientists are asking companies to pay to fix things that the companies have been breaking for generations, and the companies don’t want to.

Yes, because self-labeled “conservatives” are all in favor of fewer rules and more freedom…unless those rules involve immigrants and international trade, and those freedoms don’t include reproductive rights or expansion of legal protections to same sex marriages. Seriously, the notion that the Fox-bowing conservatives are fundamentally for free markets and free minds holds about as much water as an upside down boot.

The denial (sometimes manifested as anger) over the overwhelming fact-based evidence of global climate change are largely manufactured and marketed by a convolution of energy interests which seek to avoid dramatic market changes from converting from petroleum, natural gas, and coal based energy sources and conservative think tanks which don’t want to have to acknowledge the interdependence of the US and other nations in mitigating a global problem which would require essentially ceding some degree of autonomy to international coalition. (There is some legitimate trepidation about the latter, which would put the US having to cooperate with politically competing powers like China and Russia.) It is often marketed as an objection by the Religious Right as somehow trying to limit or reverse the impact would be “against God’s will” or whatever, which makes just about as much sense as everything else that comes from that segment including opposition to reproductive rights, gene therapy, and Intelligent Design, but that is purely a ploy to market to that segment of the population.

The more insidious arguments are those that attempt to use disagreement between climatologists about details and projections of climate change and post an isolated climatologist who opposes the theory as evidence that it isn’t true, which parallels the same kinds of arguments used to deny natural selection, tobacco harms, and the German Holocaust. They present minor variances as major problems, differences in admittedly speculative projections as evidence that “even supporters don’t agree,” and when all else fails, inveigh leading scientists and impugn their credibility with wholly fictitious claims, not to mention the spurious “common sense” arguments that are put forth with zero substantiation whatsoever.

The global climate crowd does have their own issues when it comes to motivation, hyperbole, and on occasion, credibility of certain spokespeople, but the evidence of a shift in climate behavior that strongly correlates to increases in the carbon dioxide that has been released into the atmosphere starting with the Industrial Revolution and increasing almost exponentially through the present day is plainly apparent to anyone who is willing to critically assess the data that there is climate change in process. The discussion shouldn’t be whether, or even necessarily by how much, but rather what can be reasonably done to mitigate the effects of the most credible estimates and the cost/benefit analysis of doing so, which is a conversation that is difficult to have while ideologues screech insults at one another.

Stranger

That is very true, and there is also money to be made in things like solar power and replacing old inefficient machines with new, efficient ones. But the cost savings are not spread equally and the companies who are likely to be hurt - coal and oil - have a lot of money to spend on scaring people.
The advent of the automobile improved the economy as a whole, but that didn’t help the buggy whip makers.

This is fascinating. I understand anger about guns <old Colbert> They want to take away Sweetness</oC> and I understand race, because those angry feel they are losing their special position, but most people don’t have to change much to deal with climate change. They may or may not have to pay more. Are they scared that someone will come and take away their gas guzzling truck?

It’s a manufactured wedge issue, like Benghazi or the Common Core. They keep pumping them out and sometimes it sticks.

This makes sense to me.

They’re scared that someone will take away their God.

To be clear, I’m talking here about ordinary man-on-the-street climate change deniers, like the OP’s family members. Obviously there are large companies that will genuinely suffer economic loss if climate change is addressed, who have entirely different motivations for promoting denial. Those conservatives with economic interests feed the fears of the ordinary conservatives, but the emotional fear that they’re tapping into is the religious one. As you say, the average person isn’t facing immediate economic repercussions from new regulations. But she is facing a challenge to a worldview in which God, and not man, is supreme.

I don’t know, but I have experienced this too.

I don’t have an answer as to why though. What is a good liberal equivalent?

It is manufactured, but it is (or has been made to be) more of a fundamental issue than something transitory like the supposed Benghazi scandal. Ever since the Kyoto Protocol it has been presented as virtual evidence that the UN (or Bilderbergers, or Trilateral Commission, or whomever) is trying to undermine the sovereignty of the United States, and that politicians who support efforts to recognize and ameliorate climate change contributors or support sustainable renewable energy development are part of a conspiracy to do the same. (Never mind that genuinely sustainable sources of renewable energy would free us from dependence on foreign oil reserves and make the US more secure by not obligating us to go to war over access energy supplies; that doesn’t keep the coffers of Chevron, British Petroleum, and ExxonMobil overflowing.) It has become this “Us versus Them” argument against anything that would require international collaboration for the same xenophobic mindset that fears legalizing immigration so that Mexicans can’t come and steal our shitty, low paying jobs cleaning toilets and working in slaughterhouses. The argument boils down to somehow the science must be wrong because America is always right, and it’s just a matter of finding some loose thread to pull on that will cause the data and models to come apart like a cheaply made prom dress.

But yes, behind the genuine if misguided outrage, there is a media manipulation machine that opposes recognition of climate change and an honest discussion about what can and should be done because it would have an impact on the bottom line of many of the most profitable companies and the financial interests that back them, as well as suggesting that American exceptionalism is insufficient to protect against a truly global threat, and that maybe we’ll have to sit down at a table with people we don’t like and make agreements that don’t favor us in order to protect people who aren’t even born yet.

It is interesting, though, that the viewpoint has shifted away from pure denial and more into a begrudging acknowledgement that “something” might be happening, but we don’t know what and can’t do anything about it anyway, so leave it to the future to figure it out. This line of rationalization is even more insidious because it feeds into many peoples’ natural sense of powerlessness and tendency to procrastinate. Why do something about it today when you can drink beer and spawn wild stories about how giant floating balloon factories will gobble up carbon dioxide and poop out magic fairy dust when someone invents that technology. And it isn’t as if this manipulation is occurring in some back room of oil interests and conservative lobbyists; it’s right out there in the open, being marketed in viral fashion by the same people who convinced you that four out of five physicians recommend Camel cigarettes.

Stranger

I think it’s multi-faceted. A number of the causes are discussed in this thread:

  • The economic angle (specifically, opposition from the fossil fuel industry)
  • The dislike of rules-making processes. In particular, this would have to international in scope, and would likely require a UN-like organization to coordinate and audit. A lot of conservatives see this as a threat to US sovereignty.
  • The religious angle

I think one reason hasn’t been touched on yet. A lot of conservatives are against it because liberals are for it. That type of tribalism really happens. I think an interesting data point is nuclear energy. It’s the one clean energy source you can actually find a number of conservatives favoring, even though it has high cost and gets entangled with a whole lot of federal rule-making and loan guarantees and all those things conservatives usually oppose. So why would they favor it? Because they see liberals as opposing it!

Four factors, as far as I can see:

-Conservative means resistant to change almost by definition. What? I should drive a smaller car? I can’t have my status symbol? Shut your mouth!

-Conservative/republican talking points are strongly influenced by wealthy doners, and these tend to be invested in carbon intensive industries. That is a long way of saying “Koch brothers”.

-Evangelical Christians. They either say God will take care of it, it is God’s will, or it doesn’t matter because they will be raptured at 3:27PM next Tuesday afternoon.

-Anti-intellectualism. Conservatives don’t trust anyone with letters after their name. What does Al Gore know?
Fox News constantly reinforces all of these influences. Conservatives also tend to be more inclined toward purity tests than Dems. Bernie Sanders can vote against gun control, but no conservative is allowed to vote pro-choice, for gun control, or carbon taxation.