I know plenty of highly educated people who couldn't care less about environmental protection. Something tells me that universal college education isn't the fix for climate change, although it could solve other problems.
The point I'm trying to make is that some understanding of physics and chemistry is necessary to logically conclude that human activity drives harmful changes to the environment.
For example, I understand that a glass box filled with carbon dioxide will be warmer after an hour under sunlight than the same box filled with oxygen. My parents don't. What follows is that my more liberal parent believes the environment should be protected and my more conservative parent believes it shouldn't.
If they had both gone to college and taken chemistry and physics 101, like I did, then their political leanings would be irrelevant. They would understand that current rates of pollution, especially in the United States, are making the planet Earth uninhabitable* for their precious children and grandchildren! As it stands, one is a tree-hugger and the other a brow-beater, so the dialogue is at a stalemate.
You can take this anecdote and apply it to the United States as a whole. We are politically split down the middle. Washington swings between right and left. Democratic presidents enact environmental protection, and Republican presidents undo it. The result is that the rate of pollution either stalls or increases. The problem is that at this rate of pollution, we're doomed to a terrible future.
I just want the debate to be about the science. You can't have that debate with people who coasted through American high school.
You do have politicians who just deny climate change is a thing, but you also have people who believe that in 50 years technology will have advanced enough to allow us to innovate our way out of global warming.
Arguably, the technology to stop or pause global warming (at least for decades while technology continues to develop and clean energy becomes more available) is available and cheap today, we just don’t feel impelled to use it yet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...
What I wish the "right" would notice is that both the US military and the fossil fuel companies (that is, the highly-educated conservatives) have privately acknowledged anthropogenic climate change and are preparing for it.
[edit] lol my goodness, who is downvoting me? advocates for the uneducated?