Source for the following: https://www.quora.com/
Same reason it took 40 years to ban lead from paint and gasoline after the lead industry discovered it was highly toxic.
Same reason it took a similar length of time to turn the public against tobacco.
And that reason is massive, decades-long propaganda campaigns by the affected industries, whose managers and investors were able to dupe Americans–especially conservatives–into believing, in each case, that those evil big-government socialist liberals were trying to take away American Freedoms in order to impose a soul-destroying Nanny State.
Of course the real freedom being fought for was the freedom of the rich and powerful to prey upon the 99% who are weak and helpless compared to the resources the 1% can command.
Now–for over a decade, actually–the fossil fuel industry is doing the same thing, making the same smarmy “freedom” arguments, with the eager support of those who worship the rich, who indulge in the fantasy that great wealth is attainable by anyone who just works hard and keeps his nose clean. When in fact vertical mobility is dropping in the United States to below the level in other developed countries, as the game gets more and more rigged.
The fossil fuel industry’s secretive, billion-dollar propaganda campaign has been documented in a year-long project by Drexel University sociologist Robert J. Brulle:
>>“The climate change countermovement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act on the issue of global warming,” said Brulle. “Like a play on Broadway, the countermovement has stars in the spotlight – often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians – but behind the stars is an organizational structure of directors, script writers and producers, in the form of conservative foundations. If you want to understand what’s driving this movement, you have to look at what’s going on behind the scenes.”
To uncover how the countermovement was built and maintained, Brulle developed a listing of 118 important climate denial organizations in the U.S. He then coded data on philanthropic funding for each organization, combining information from the Foundation Center with financial data submitted by organizations to the Internal Revenue Service.
The final sample for analysis consisted of 140 foundations making 5,299 grants totaling $558 million to 91 organizations from 2003 to 2010.<<
– See more at: Page on drexel.edu
Propaganda works best when it panders to people’s biases, to their innate tribalism, to their hopes and fears. And the fossil fuel industry does all of the above, expertly, using outfits like the Heartland Insitute, that established its reputation through its participation in the tobacco danger denial campaign.
Now it has extended to social media and comment threads of major publications, just as the Chinese and Russian governments do regularly (read any article about either country on The Economist or the New York Times and look at the tidal waves of comments by people who are obviously working for those governments–it’s almost comical).
The Guardian columnist George Monbiot has been observing this for decades:
“After I wrote about online astroturfing in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them.
“Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of disinterested members of the public: he used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments.”
The need to protect the internet from ‘astroturfing’ grows ever more urgent | George Monbiot
So it’s no wonder that among the topics where the beliefs of the publix differ from those of scientists, there’s a 37 point spread in acceptance of global warming.
Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society
“Americans are less worried about climate change than the residents of any other high-income country, as my colleague Megan Thee-Brennan wroteTuesday. When you look at the details of these polls, you see that American exceptionalism on the climate stems almost entirely from Republicans. Democrats and independents don’t look so different from people in Japan, Australia, Canada and across Europe.”
…which is why the steady “Southern-ification” of the GOP since Nixon implemented his Southern Strategy has caused the GOP to devolve from a political party into a tribe–spinning off most of its Eisenhower-style moderates, who are now Independents because they’d feel embarrassed and demeaned to be associated with what that party has become.