Do Not Mess With Their Religion

A good op/ed by Thomas Homer-Dixon in the NYT. It is about the catastrophic climate change we are undergoing and how we are not dealing with it.

But social scientists have identified another major reason: Climate change has become an ideologically polarizing issue. It taps into deep personal identities and causes what Dan Kahan of Yale calls “protective cognition” — we judge things in part on whether we see ourselves as rugged individualists mastering nature or as members of interconnected societies who live in harmony with the environment. Powerful special interests like the coal and oil industries have learned how to halt movement on climate policy by exploiting the fear people feel when their identities are threatened.

To be a republican you have to believe some pretty crazy things.