Jay Bullock asks the following question this morning:

Why are conservatives, particularly social conservatives, so invested in denying that global climate change exists?

His post is rather long and ranting on the subject, but that's the crux of it right there.  Now then, I'm not one of the climate change deniers that he mentions, nor am I social conservative... in fact I don't deny that global climate change exists.  However, I will take a stab at answering this question from my perspective.  After all, it is my world.

First of all, Jay is working of an interesting set of assumptions:

There is no reason, other than the obstinance of many conservatives, particularly those in power, why this country hasn't taken the same steps forward that every other Western nation has in both recognizing that the problem exists and that our behavior contributes significantly to that problem.

The fact that the problem exists and that human behavior contributes significantly to the problem is hardly proven science.  The data is very much still open to interpretation.  In fact, there has been a lot of cherry picking of data regarding what the climate was like centuries ago in order to "prove" the change.  From the famous "hockey stick" which miraculously left out a significant warming period that occurred during medieval times, to attempting to understand the causes of the "little ice age" that occurred between the mid 1600's through the mid 1800's.  The scale of time that one must think about when examining global climate and geological phenomena is just not something that people are used to dealing with.  People look at what happened in the last 10 years, and then think its valid to extrapolate that data about 100 years in the future.  Hell, people want to try to compare this year to last and extrapolate that out.  It just doesn't work that way.  The variables in play here work out in scales that last decades, centuries, and even millennia.

Not only that, but the impact that humans have on the global environment is hardly known to be significant.  The amount of carbon that people put out compared with nature is trivial.  The impact that natural solar cycles have on our planet is also very significant, but is hardly ever talked about by global warming proponents.  In fact, I would argue that a great deal of global warming proponents are pretty damn egotistical to think that people have that significant of an impact on a system as large as the Earth.  I can't speak for social conservatives, but that may in fact be a root cause of their thinking.  After all, most religious people accept their person insignificance in the face of God, so it's rather easy for them to accept their insignificance in the environment.

Jay also tries to play a little switcheroo by talking about plate tectonics:

While certainly it's true that there is a small segment of the scientific community willing to deny the existence of global warming, surely that cannot be reason enough for conservatives to cling to. There is no question that often minorities of scientists can be right; consider that a mere half a century ago, only a tiny few geologists understood or promoted plate tectonics, something we all take for granted now. But the trick in these instances is to watch the movement--once scientists were able to read about, understand, and verify through their own experiments the concepts of plate tectonics, the scientific community shifted rapidly and solidly into consensus about it.

That's the interesting thing about science.  It's not stable, and nothing is ever proven.  If things were ever proven beyond a doubt, then we would never discover new things.  We used to be in consensus that Newton was right until Einstein came along and thought it might work differently.  We also used to think that light and sound worked the same way, and searched in vain for about 10 years for the Ether.  The fact that everyone is working on global warming doesn't mean that it's proven science.  It's a reality of how the university system and public funding work.  And by that, I don't mean that they're all liberal environmentalist hippies.  I mean that the system is set up in such a way that there is a definite confirmation bias that encourages new students to not go against the flow of current thinking, otherwise they'll never move forward in their careers.  The same thing has infected other areas of science, like research into String Theory.

What all of this has led to is a bad case of "do something syndrome".  Before we actually know the scale, or even the real cause of the problem, people are all up in arms to just do something... anything.  The problem, is that the scale of the problem (if it exists and we can change it) is so large that the cost of doing something is huge.  That makes it completely irresponsible to "do something" without knowing that it will actually work, which we don't.  Signing onto Kyoto would have seriously damaged our economy.  It's so harming, that no countries in Europe have come close to meeting their own goals.

People are jumping onto the Ethanol bandwagon, even though it's a less efficient fuel than gasoline (see update below), and the new demand is driving up the cost of food everywhere.  Mexico just announced that they're instituting price controls on corn because tortillas are getting too expensive.  Not a good thing for a country with so many poor that depend on that staple.  Similar effects are being felt in the U.S where the cost of feeding dairy and beef cattle is increasing.  The original EPA mandates on reformulated gas weren't done so much to help the environment, as they were to pass certain tests.  Reformulated gas decreases gas mileage, and puts out different pollution than normal gas that we just didn't happen to test for, but we did something anyway.

People are also falling in love with hydrogen fuel cell technology, without even realizing that hydrogen is not an energy producer, but rather an energy transporter in that system.  In fact, if we were to fully switch over to hydrogen fuel cells for our cars and stop using gas, odds are that pollution would increase (unless we were to fully switch over to nuclear power plants which environmentalists just looooovvveeee).  Of course, the cost of doing this would be huge as well.

And all of this to fix a problem that may or may not exist, that we may or may not be able to fix in the first place.  In fact, our time and resources might be better spent find ways to live and cope with global climate change, instead of trying to fight an war against it which cannot be won.  There is also an interesting economic argument to be made for delaying action, but Asymmetrical Information does a better job at explaining that than I could.

So to sum up, I would offer this question in response to Jay's.  Why are environmentalists and liberals so invested in ignoring the cost and impact of their policies on the people, and so willing to force them on people through the rule of law?

Update:  I should be a little more thorough in my statement about ethanol being less efficient than gasoline in order to be completely fair.  That statement is only true if used in the current line up of cars that allow you to use either E85 or gasoline.  If you have an engine that is designed with a high compression ratio meant only for E85, than it can be more efficient than gasoline, but can't be used with both fuels.  This has nothing do with the cost of mandating such technologies, only the pure efficiency argument.