The USA has rather embarrassed itself. A large minority of the country has kept stating things that were obviously foolish. In particular, Donald Trump has spent the 4 years of his administration undermining all of the science and therefore the gradual move towards acceptance of the the facts that most of the rest of the world has already accepted.
In particular, while the Republican party has in the past advanced science, they have completely abandoned this position. Climate change needs universal support for dealing with it if we are to succeed.
Given all this, it is not a surprise that so many people in the USA actually believe it.
Indonesia has a mix of religious rubbish(religious people arguing against mitigation, despite all religions telling us to look after the planet), and low education which adds up to their low belief in climate change (18% do not believe that global warming is true). They tend to give to much media attention to politicians ramblings (and many of these politicians are corrupt, taking payments for allowing damage to the environment). Saudi Arabia announced plans to fight global warming, but acknowledged it will continue to extract and export its vast petroleum reserves – these two are completely contradictory and cannot be met at once (one huge positive, is that if electrification of road traffic continues as fast as is predicted, this market will collapse long before Saudi Arabia runs out). About 16%of this country are denying the facts of climate change.
Given the standard of education in the USA, one would hope that these stupid views would be easy to argue against, but this does not seem to be the case. For reference, while the UK still has climate change denial, just 4% of a recent survey claimed to doubt the science. Yet in America the number is still around 13% of the countries population.
What should we take from this? Well every country on this list (countries with the most climate change denial) have climate acceptance levels of over 80%! Surely this is easily high enough to fully commit to fighting climate change? Then lets get on with it.
