It's not to prevent it, or to mitigate its damages, it's for the people who disproportionately caused it, and have already benefitted from it, to finalize their control over the resources they want. Some of those resources are some of us.
A lot of Trump's seemingly odd obsessions like taking over Greenland and Canada are less odd (but still very unsettling) when you accept that the global power elite have already accepted that run-away climate change is inevitable and the only open questions are who is going to profit from it and how.
In the near term, however, Americans will blame everything except man-made pollution for the fallout from climate change.
At the same time, we don't have China's industrial capacity or their stomach for massive state-driven subsidies. I don't see how you escape peak oil otherwise.
I think the median American voter doesn't care and is happy to live a life of consumption with big cars, big houses and cheap energy. There is also the issue of fossil industry lobbying and propaganda, of course, but I think that's mostly working _because_ the American people don't really care.
Has the climate collapsed? There are still glaciers in Glacier Nation Park. The Maldives remain islands, not seamounts. The Gulf Stream still warms Europe. The pace of change has been consistently far slower than climate models have predicted, and it's rational to discount them until such time as there's a shred of evidence climatologists have ceased crying wolf.
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