Climate change denial is based on prioritizing consumerism and wealth accumulation over human health and survival

The outsized carbon footprints of society’s richest entrench inequality and threaten the world’s ability to stave off catastrophic climate change. The statistics are startling. The world’s wealthiest 10% were responsible for around half of global emissions in 2015, according to a 2020 report from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute. The top 1% were responsible for 15% of emissions, nearly twice as much as the world’s poorest 50%, who were responsible for just 7% and will feel the brunt of climate impacts despite bearing the least responsibility for causing them.

BBC: How the rich are driving climate change

Climate change indifference is based on false hope, inattention, or ignorance

Hope for some, however, stems from the belief that God or nature will solve the problem without the need for human intervention (which we call “false hope”). The most prevalent doubts are low prioritization, greed, and intergroup conflict

Frontiers: How Hope and Doubt Affect Climate Change Mobilization

Action on climate change has been stymied by politics, lobbying by energy companies and the natural pace of scientific research — but one of the most significant barriers is our own minds.

Part of the reason it takes us so long to act is because the human brain has spent nearly 200,000 years focused on the present. “Find food. Make shelter. Mate!” We only began to contemplate time, and by extension the future, within the last few hundred years.

Making the future tangible is only one of the psychological barriers that have made climate change into an elusive problem.

PBS: How your brain stops you from taking climate change seriously

Acting on climate change represents a trade-off between short-term and long-term benefits, which is the hardest trade-off for people to make. Decades of work on temporal discounting point out that we overvalue benefits in the short term relative to benefits in the long term.

IN-SIGHTS: Why people aren’t motivated to address climate change

Climate change concern is based on altruism and science

Sadly, the climate science is unequivocal. The world is heating up. The past seven years have been the seven warmest ever recorded. And climate scientists have long been in agreement that, if average global temperatures increase to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average, there is a high likelihood the planet will tip into irreversible climate change, with catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. Current global average temperatures are around 1°C above the pre-industrial average. At current rates of warming, the scientists estimate that we will hit the 1.5°C tipping point in or around 2033. That’s in 11 years’ time.

British Medical Journal — Who Cares About Climate Change?

Scientists have known for some time, from multiple lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth’s climate, primarily through greenhouse gas emissions. Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Environmental Research\