It's 2014. The fact that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it should be blatantly obvious at this point, and the question should be "what should be done about it?" But instead, large swathes of the country continue to deny it and/or think that we should do nothing about it. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Crazy) said that climate change is all about "the President's green dream." UN Agenda 21 conspiracy theories abound. I've come across conservatives on Twitter who think that climate change is all just a conspiracy for "statist" world government.
What the hell is going on? Why are appeals to saving the environment falling on deaf ears among many voters? The answer should be obvious to anyone who has observed the phenomena of white flight and the ensuing sprawl... or anyone who has even taken a look at the Racial Dot Map.
Segregation.
While Republican politicians who deny climate change and fight environmental initiatives are mostly doing the bidding of Big Fossil Fuel, rank-and-file conservatives who deny climate change and believe in the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory are doing so for very different reasons. Starting after the end of World War II, sprawl began in most American cities. The initial push came from the government, which built the interstate highway system connecting once relatively far-flung towns from the center city, provided cheap mortgages for people to buy houses out in the suburbs, and in many cases forbade denser building inside the city to accommodate growth (and also redlined certain neighborhoods, where banks refused to lend to prospective homeowners.)
But the pull of the suburbs for the average person was, and continues to be, race. Talk to just about anybody who puts up with an hourlong commute from the far-flung exurbs, over many miles and through often ridiculous traffic jams, and the reasons usually given have something to do with "good schools" (read: white schools) and "safe neighborhoods" (read: white neighborhoods.) Eventually, the sprawl of the 1950s and the 1960s came to (allegedly) no longer have either of those, and while some people made the rather wise (though frequently expensive) decision to move back into the city, others packed up and moved to even farther-flung areas. And so on, and so forth, until nowadays, in Houston where I live, going in some directions "Metro Houston" begins about 40-50 miles before you actually reach the center of Houston. And there seems to be little sign of this letting up: every day, new subdivisions pop up on what used to be farm fields, filling in with new commuters who have decided, apparently, that spending two or three hours a day idling in traffic beats the alternative of, I guess, living around poor people.
And this, to be blunt, is where the opposition to "green," the climate change denial, and the Agenda 21 conspiracy theories come from. To a lot of people, living in a dense inner-city neighborhood with convenient, walkable access to daily necessities and a short commute to work on a light rail system would be a dream come true. But to your average Tea Party member living in the suburbs, scrapping the long commute and the miserable life in which they work to death to pay the mortgage on the house that they spend, maybe, three waking hours a day in for this life means, well, black and brown people. No yard. "Bad" schools. "Dangerous" neighborhoods. It isn't worth the trade-off, even though I suspect that many of them would love that life if they actually tried it.
The sad part of the post-WWII sprawl boom is that many people now are incapable of living in a dense urban environment (or at least they think they are), and fear environmentalism because they fear the end result. Saving the environment might be nice in theory, but not at the expense of their well-manicured lawn and the gates around their subdivision to keep the "others" out. And the climate change denialism and Agenda 21 conspiracy theories appeal to this crowd, because if climate change is made up and Agenda 21 is just a conspiracy to take away your golfs, then you don't have to do anything about it and can continue on with spending all that time in your car.
And, of course, the other effects of sprawl. Cheap credit and cheap oil are the crack cocaine of the suburbanite; without these two things, sprawl becomes a lot harder. Voting for policies that the suburbanite thinks will provide cheap credit and cheap oil leads to the housing bubble and "Drill, Baby, Drill." All of it makes for a large contingent that seems to actually want to degrade the environment, because the alternative, to them, is so much worse.