1. Unlike what reddit loves to say, politics are not as simple as "conservatives want to keep things frozen in time, progressives want to advance society". Both sides want to advance, and I'd say the main difference is that conservatives tend to prefer cautious bottom-up changes while the progressives love radical top-down changes when it is for what they consider a good cause.

2. It's not true that conservatives don't care about climate change. It's just that on a political level in North America the left has dominated that field for so long that the right can't even set a foot in it.

But if you look at global conservatism (in Europe for example), they do care about climate change, they just disagree with the left about how to approach it. The left usually poses that capitalism and consumerism are the problem, and propose global treaties that attack it on a global scale. Conservatives disagree that capitalism/consumerism are to blame and propose that instead of letting the problem rest on the hands of international committees, you approach it on a community level, fostering local sovereignty, holding ordinary people accountable while also empowering them to act better and protect the environment in their own neighborhood. See "Green Philosophy" by Roger Scruton. He explains that sometimes we are stuck thinking about global co2 emissions while not realizing that we are destroying our own homes.

Conservatives are also rarely fans of solar energy and the likes. They usually push for nuclear energy.

>If that’s true why don’t conservatives care about climate change? It’s easily the biggest factor in the lives of the next generation.

Likely true in the long run, but still that is a much longer timeline than, say, a labor revolution, which historically happens in a few years. That is the sort of drastic change that terrifies parents.

I think its because they see it as something that wont effect current kids WHEN they are kids. When they get older they can deal with it but right now they value the paycheck that keeps their kids fed over a shift in our energy economy. That is the argument anyway.

There are lots of idiosyncratic issues that ended up on one side of the political spectrum with little direct correlation to the advertised philosophy of the group. In the case of Climate this is due to heavy investment by fossil fuel within the media right leaning people consume.

I’m not going to speak for everyone who is a conservative. But I personally see the link between population and climate change but I also don’t see it as a contingent link. As in, increasing population doesn’t necessarily mean more climate change, due to adoption of things like nuclear energy, wind, solar, etc.

One could also see the US heavy adoption of natural gas and subsequently being in the lead of dropping CO2 emissions in 2019 by absolute numbers and the western world in general as positive steps on climate change.

You could also look at statements on the climate on the past hundred years and it goes back and forth between the earth is heating up and cooling down. And question why this current statement is any different.

There’s a myriad of reasons.

And conservatives wouldn’t want to live in a woke hellscape where their kids are being told they have original sin based on skin color. So I doubt you want a radical societal shift to the right, the same way they don’t want a radical shift to the left.

I never said it was more cautious and picky in either specific direction.