Wikipedia has some good content about this. Basically in the 80's petrol funded think tanks pushed the idea that global warming was an phenomena created from wh

Wikipedia has some good content about this. Basically in the 80's petrol funded think tanks pushed the idea that global warming was an phenomena created from whole cloth by a cabal of globalist leftists. I'm not sure of the exact claim of what they were/are trying to achieve, but essentially they want to put the brakes on capitalism by making people consume less, and ultimately disrupting economic growth. There are a few reasons why this was effective, especially in the US. The first is the most powerful, best expressed by the old Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Second, many believe that God would never do such a thing to us - it states clearly in the Bible that the world is ours to do with what we want, and it would be unjust for God to let us shoot ourselves in the foot like that, and God is not unjust. And third, it's not even real science, just dirty red communists trying to psych us out, and feckless scientists out for grant money. Fourth, Americans seem very prone to believe on authority, powerful and wealthy people, even when the statement is self-serving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming has a lot of great content, and is well linked to, e.g., climate change denial articles.