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> In my experience with some conservatives, it seems that they believe global warming is happening but they are skeptical of how effective left-leaning politicians can be in combating climate change.
This is a major point. It's not that conservatives (in general) don't think it's happening, but believe that the solutions provided won't yield results to how expensive or "sacrificing" they are. Especially when you have big lobbies involved and especially when you consider China and how they have no real plan on cutting emissions.
China is the world's biggest investor in solar technology and hopes to grow its solar power to 20GW by 2020. [1]
China forced all taxi drivers in Beijing to use electric cars, a desperate and very controversial move. [2]
China is highly subsidizing its high-speed rail companies, bleeding billions of dollars per year, to cut other transportation methods. [3]
I am not saying to follow their example (some of their actions are probably not the best investments, environmentally speaking), but saying they do not have a real plan is quite untrue.
And China's example proves nothing here. Am I supposed to be surprised that an authoritarian government somehow finagled the political capital to invest in industries guaranteed to be highly disruptive to its most major economic competitor? Cuz I'm not.
My point was to prove the fact that China does have real plans to cut on emissions. Your answer is that their policies are economically viable and future-proof. I don't understand what is your point.
Conservatives love spending huge amounts of money for a good return, that's how we've gotten cheap solar, for example. They also have excellent time preference and planning for the future, accusations of the contrary run into observed examples of who actually is wealthy for all scales of wealth.
To expand upon the conservative reasoning:
Suicide never fixed anything. Killing our own economy and literally killing our own people makes some people (suspiciously never the people doing the suffering...) feel better about themselves not being as guilty. But lets face it, unless you can get "cult leader" levels of suicidal thinking into the entire species, human #235325 sacrificing himself and his family merely means human #85735 over there is going to burn the coal and oil, perhaps a little later. All the "conservation" stuff has no impact on the earth. A history book a million years from now would read something like "all the coal got burnt; some felt holier than thou for not personally burning; but it all got burnt" For some, being anti-suicide is a religious belief. For others, its just common sense. Why should I kill my kids so they don't burn coal which supposedly makes them holy, when someone else's living kids will burn the coal anyway? Why can't those people simply accept cyanide pills for themselves and their families, why do they insist on dragging us into their death cult kicking and screaming? In the long run from the earths point of view what does it matter if its all getting burnt anyway? Will mother nature "feel better" knowing a Chinese dude burned the oil instead of a rural white guy burning the same oil?
Wisdom about time is stronger on the right than on the left, see financial investment for example. Or just simple time preference WRT criminality statistics. Lets say we have to kill a million americans by ripping away their jobs and forever dumping them into drug addicted rural poverty without medical treatment leading to young death, lets really make them suffer because thats what we need to do to lower the carbon rate by 5%. Whats the result of all that human suffering? Well, the same sea level rise will happen and same climate change will happen, just maybe a couple weeks or months later. Perhaps the next ice age will arrive a few months sooner. But the human cost, oh my God. From a moral or ethical standpoint its pure evil to torture people just to move a date on a calendar that doesn't matter anyway. Its pure evil, basically. Many things are inevitable such as death and aging. The best measure of a human being is in how you face the inevitable. Grotesque slaughter and torture says more about the people proposing that "economic fine tuning" than they want made public. I would rather bravely face a 30M sea level rise on November 23rd 2071 than shoot my neighbor's kid in the head today to face the same 30M sea level rise on November 24th 2071. Sociopaths will do anything to get ahead, but conservatives have moral and ethical standards. Conservatives frankly are just braver people. Look at military demographics for example. I could support environmental policies that will ensure my survival a little longer, but what good is mere survival if you have to become a monster to do it? You have to truly and deeply hate your fellow man to support "economic fine tuning" like is usually proposed, have a deep desire to experience other's suffering and pain, especially of the unwilling, of the lower social classes. I'm not libertarian enough to say that's an OK way to look at the world.
Some are not part of social groups where holiness signalling spirals would benefit them so they don't bother signalling. If all your academic friend retweet your guilty terror of global warming you get a big payoff. If you don't, you're not "cool". You have to do this thing. The thing don't mean anything its just what you have to do to be cool. Not everyone hangs out with degenerates, frankly. Or their personal variety of degenerate gets "twitter cred" quoting the bible or just being a normal human or whatever. Just saying a lot of noise in the system comes from metastasized social media. A cancer of social signalling that only benefits itself and its own growth rate while lowering quality of life. Some ideas are just bad in a certain moral or ethical sense to propagate. Some folks have religious prohibition of proudly publicly being "holier than thou" and frankly thats good.
This is actually a fantasy that has no basis in reality.
You claim that conservatives "(in general)" do believe in global warming but poll after poll after poll demonstrates otherwise[1]. 85% of Republicans don't think humans are to blame and (by extension) there's nothing we could possibly do about it. The Republican President claims quite emphatically that it's a "hoax." How do these observable facts jive at all with your claim that conservatives don't believe in the "solutions" when most don't even acknowledge the problem.
As for your fantastic claim that China won't cut emissions again, I suggest looking at reality. See the Climate Action Tracker for China [2]. China is on track to achieve its peak admissions by 2030 which is what they agreed to under the historic Paris Agreement.
The facts are out there. There's no need for you to make up fantastical claims you just have to have the courage to look at them.
