Today's blog contains a logical discussion on a political subject.
It was written to be readable from the viewpoint that Climate Change (CC) is the gospel truth, or from the viewpoint that CC is akin to witchcraft, and is tantamount to scaremongering. Please don't read your beliefs (or anyone else's) into my words; Assume I am neutral (if you believe in such a concept).
After watching Tomorrowland (2015 George Clooney, Hugh Laurie), it became much more clear in my mind why people who identify as conservative can be so much more resistive to the concept of Climate Change, and the implications that seem to be the natural results of that concept.
I was raised conservative, though I tend to identify more centrist these days. I have viewed the world from the conservative viewpoint for several years as an adult, so I could be qualified to make these observations.

The most generic definition of political conservatism is the resistance to change from the current state of things. Accepting CC and all its implications is a huge change, fundamentally, of mindset, regarding the relationship between man and the earth. Not a few conservatives have the mindset that the earth and all of the resources on it are, by design, created for the use of mankind. In addition to the Big Bang and Evolution, conservatives are also being asked to believe that, in fact, God did not create the earth for man to use as he sees fit. A conservative might say something along the lines of: "If the world as we know it is coming to an end due to our wickedness, where's our Noah?"
The other big (and more immediately affecting) change is how CC changes every single man-made system in the world, and how they work, going forward. The implications of Climate change are what really upsets a conservative's apple cart. Conservatives can easily be among those who intuitively understand what happens when there is a shortage of an important substance (I don't think many Doomsday Preppers vote Democratic very often). The shortage of a commodity can get ugly very quickly, unless there are viable alternatives, or unless the shortage is with something we can easily do without. Climate Change implies the eventual shortage of habitable land, fresh water, and other staples that are critical for survival in general. But those are the eventual consequences, while it is the more immediate changes accepting CC would require us to make which more adequately explain why it's so hard for a conservative to swallow the Climate Change pill whole. Those implications to which I refer are this: The only way to prevent a man-made CC apocalypse is for people to stunt the growth of everything man made. The faster anything grows (population, commerce, any sort of progress) the more resources it uses. Even if everyone agreed on the concept of Climate Change, there is no way everyone will agree on what mankind's collective response should be. Have less children? The total fertility rate across the globe has halved since 1960 because better health care and technology means we don't need to have as many children, and because birth control means that people can more realistically decide whether or not to have another child. Christians and Muslims are the only groups of people whose current population and fertility rates suggest a majority share in the foreseeable future. Christians in America fit nicely into the conservative corner, and right now, the idea of there being more Muslims in the world than Christians would seem to have a larger likelihood to influence their reproductive choices than Climate Change would.
I realize that this part of my theory requires a zero-sum mentality, and not all conservatives have one. I also realize that innovation has and will continue to minimize the negative impact that each person and each percentage of growth has on the earth, as long as we keep that goal in our priorities. But unless someone comes out with a technology that makes more people and more growth become somehow good for the earth, my point stands.
Growth and progress has been the constant theme for the world in recorded history. Growth and progress have been the trend for just about everything man-made (over time), since the history of ever (generally speaking). By "growth" I am talking about the growth of population, revenue, income,  consumption, 'the tax base', the labor force, GDP, society, technology, etc., etc. For all intents and purposes, each of these things seems to be tied to all the others. Certainly no reasonable person advocates complete abandonment of progress for humankind altogether, but how do we divorce the growth of everything else from progress itself? I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm suggesting that it may be difficult enough that conservatives may prefer to try any number of things before embracing the slowing of all growth in general. If we are not immediately running out of resources, but the use of those resources is killing the planet, the most immediately obvious way to try to slow that effect is to pass laws that will seem to inherently prohibit growth itself. For the longest time, many conservatives have already believed that the concepts surrounding free enterprise and free markets are near to sacred, and conversely, nearly any artificial control of business or markets is the path to the dark side, with the potential to wreck whole economies, and enslave mankind in a socialistic or communistic hell of unintended consequences  and central control of  the country or the world by a small group of people ill-suited to run it.
America was founded on the idea that peoples' freedoms trumps any sort of "God-given" right of a king to rule said people. A major tenet of many American conservatives' belief system is the concept that any right not expressly given to the Federal government by the Constitution is effectively denied from the federal government, and reserved for more local governments to deal with as they see fit. So if you don't like a law in your state and can't get it changed, you have options to move to any of the other states where you like the laws better.  Climate Change throws all of this out the window. In fact, the less advanced countries will likely continue to effect CC more than the more advanced countries who restrict their own citizens from climate-harming activities. Those less-developed countries will also easily benefit from those same rules as long as they are developed enough to compete in any way with the advanced contries, since they don't have to follow the same self-limiting laws. This creates all sorts of problems for people who run businesses and who don't want to see third-world countries and companies from those countries become more powerful relative to their own, because their own countries "shot themselves in the foot" with the self-imposed limits of climate change laws and rules.
Until recently, there were still scientists around who would argue that either CC is not proven science, or that mankind's causative actions are not proven to be the driving force behind it (so there is no way to know if anything we do will have a positive effect in preventing the bad consequences). I haven't personally taken a poll among qualified scientist (not that I would know how), but it seems that scientists who are willing to say any of this are now few and far-between, or they have been effectively silenced or  discredited. The politics and hype around the entire subject has been so great that no evidence made readily available to everyday people can be considered unbiased.


None of what I have discussed (except the one sentence on innovation) does anything to help us take better care of our environment, but just in case anyone out there thought that conservatives are only willfully dense and stubborn, perhaps it can benefit everyone for these thought processes to be better understood.