The short answer is greed. The short answer is wrong. The long answer is a disbelief in the end of the world. I wonder if the long answer is right.
There are two rational responses to the scientific consensus on the extinction-level event that is human-caused global climate change. The first is: oh shit, we need to do something toot sweet. The second is: life will find a way.
We typically think of climate change deniers as, at least on the face of it, faithful Christians (primarily Evangelicals). This is not to paint too wide of a brush on Christians — millions of faith-proclaiming Christians support both common sense and radical approaches to the planetary problem of human-caused climate change — but while not all self-proclaimed Christians are climate change deniers, a vast number of climate change deniers are self-proclaimed Christians.
Inherent in that proclamation is their faith in life everlasting. At the end of the apocalypse, Jesus (as the Son of Man, the Messiah, and the root and descendent of King David) reigns supreme.
Jesus is a poor man, a carpenter with no home, no fine clothes, and no family to call his own. At the end of the apocalypse, he will arise from the ashes of the world and his army will rise behind him.
The end of the world is not the end of life. It has come and gone on this planet at least five times before, and it has always found a way to go on.
Earth will change, and our species will adapt to the changes or go extinct. But life — if “only” at the level of ultra-small bacteria — will find a way.
In the meantime, when shit goes down, access to coal will matter; access to natural gas, to oil, to water — these will all matter. It will matter who lives on an island, and who has high-enough and strong-enough fences, and who can escape from one property to another in a helicopter.
If you don’t believe in the end of the world, it can’t scare you. But even if you don’t believe human-caused global climate change is an extinction-level event, you’re still a human being on this planet, and you must have the sense that something drastic is happening all around you.
And so they took the resources. And so they took the land. And so they financed a military to defend them both.
They’ll be fine, they think. But the great unwashed — those without a home, without fine clothes, and now, without a family to call their own — they will get swept away in the flood.
Greed doesn’t motivate climate change deniers. Callousness does. And it all comes from not believing in the end of the world.