[randusername]

I can understand people having their own reasons for dismissing the facts or the rhetoric.

What I can't wrap my head around is the conspiracy thinking around environmentalism.

What's so nefarious about clean air and water? I'll never forget when my grandmother walked out of WALL-E because she said it was government propaganda. She is a regular person, not a coal magnate or anything.

[krapp]

You need to understand the political and cultural history. Environmentalism has been associated with leftist, feminist and communist ideology going back to the hippies and the antiwar movement (which makes it easy for many Americans to mistrust by default.) When Trump said he believed global warming was a Chinese hoax (remember that?) he was echoing a belief amongst the right that environmentalism and "global warming" was a plot to undermine American business and sovereignty, and that climate science supporting anthropogenic climate change was manufactured by "cultural Marxist academics" to push that agenda.

This conspiracy thinking has been pushed by Republicans, right-wing think tanks, coal, oil, manufacturing and like industries attempting to undermine public trust in climate science since at least the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial

[randusername]

Interesting. So it's a guilty by association thing. I get that propaganda plays a big role, it just never made sense to me why it worked.

So a green energy revolution sounds exciting to me, but to my grandma it would be a green energy _revolution_, the scary and unstable connotation.

[worksonmine]

> What's so nefarious about clean air and water?

Nothing, but what puts me off is the sale of emission rights etc. Is it a problem or not? I care more about deforestation than a warming climate. There is always some product to buy behind the headlines and it drives me crazy.

The same people asking me to pay climate taxes are trying to tell me infinite growth can exist. I already live like a hermit and if everyone lived like me we wouldn't have a problem. We can't pay our way out of the problem and anyone who tells me we can is only out to make money.

I'm not against a clean planet, I'm against the politicians and businesses finding another way to extract money from their worker bees.