Trump Has Called Climate Change a Chinese Hoax. Beijing Says It Is Anything But

In the United States in particular, climate change skepticism isn't about evidence or science. It's tied up with political ideology, personal identity, social identification, and a host of other very non-scientific factors. For instance, that some of the proposed solutions for fighting climate change wound up aligning pretty close with other liberal policy ideas (carbon taxes and cap and trade, for instance, were easy to malign as "increasing taxes"), which helped prime the pump for denying climate change altogether by seeming suspicious to other groups. Getting around these issues, especially now that denial/skepticism has become deeply entrenched along party lines, is one hell of a difficult problem to figure out.

That's how you end up with people like Trump in charge. Did Trump ever have to debate the effect of automation on the economy and how he was going to handle an economy with more supply of unskilled workers than demand? Hell no, it just turned into a pissing match over a misogynistic comment and no information of value was disseminated into the public sphere for three quarters of the election campaign.

People are far more interested in lauding their moral superiority over people they (often wrongly) perceive to be less intelligent than themselves, than they are in learning new information. A well researched counter-argument to the latest scientific publication on climate change will get about 10 clicks and convince nobody, an article one step up from "durrrr this idiot politician thinks climate change causes every natural disaster" will get millions and sway an election.

That's why it's the job of everyone in politics to provide the best, and only the best, possible argument for whatever position they take. You need to give your opponent only one thing to talk about if you expect a response to it.

On the plus-side if you crash, probably so does human civilization, so there won't be much in the way of history books to record this idiocy..

I've always thought that instead of government regulations we should just have a laissez-faire approach where externalities are assessed and paid for (e.g. the carbon-credit direction but much more generically).

You want to drill in the arctic? No one should be stopping you. An agency can asses the value of the environmental harm you are estimated to cause and you will spend an equivalent amount of money to offset the negative externalities. If it still makes economical sense to drill with externalities taken into account, go ahead and do it.

My cynical grumpy core wants to parse this as "It's going to be weird to look at <Non-US> for leadership". But ask first, complain later. :)

You surely must be joking, nobody can be so delusional and wrong