I think that there are several (sometimes independent, sometimes interlocking) factors at work. You do have the fundamentalists, sometimes making the ‘zOMG, basically everything is in God’s Hands!’ argument, sometimes just…a bit tepid…at questioning their leadership; but that’s not really explanatory: were the leadership different, people who score low on critical thinking and high on obedience to authority could just as easily Accept The One Truth Of Climate Change(which would at least make them right; but for reasons exactly as blinkered as those that currently make them wrong).
You also have specific groups with fairly visible, immediate, self interest. Unlike Finland, which has (in round numbers) zero fossil fuels(a bit of peat, plus lots of trees, the exact ‘carbon neutral’ status of use as biomass is a matter of some debate among biologists), the US has lots of them: 3rd largest oil producer, 2nd largest coal producer, 2nd largest natural gas producer. Sinclair said " “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” We have a lot of salaries that depend on that(and, given that many of our fossile fuel industries are concentrated in certain areas of the country, and we are a Federalist republic, this means that some states are practically company towns, rather than being blended into a homogenous nation at large(though even that homogenous nation at large owes its relatively low electricity prices to coal, primarily).
There’s also the matter of our…enthusiasm… for ‘capitalism’ and ‘free markets’. Even if many of us aren’t sure exactly what those are, or terribly consistent in actually upholding them, the national consensus that ain’t no commie pinko gonna take them away is robust. Unfortunately, ‘climate change’ is the largest market failure in the history of human civilization. True free-market doctrinaires loath, and prefer not to think about, market failures at all; but a market failure this big? Nobody wants to hear about that. There are ‘market-based-solutions’ (carbon pricing, cap-and-trade, variations on that theme) and those are, indeed, what get proposed if you don’t want to be burned at stake; but for anyone with an ideological commitment to the goodness(often in explicitly moral terms, in addition to the claim of impressive efficiency, victory over communism, etc.) of free markets, market failure stings. Market failure on a scale never before seen stings a lot, and implies the necessity of regulation(even if it be market-styled, as with cap and trade). Our mixture of pragmatism and hypocrisy has generally allowed smaller regulatory deviations from pure free-marketeering(just look at the Ag Bill!); but this would be The Biggest, Most Dramatic, recognition of market failure since the concept was articulated. Not a popular concept.
I don’t doubt that tribal, low-information-voters, and similar just-plain-idiots have something to do with it, I’m sure that they do; but the thing about clueless people is that you can generally make up their minds for them, with sufficient resources, so they don’t really explain anything themselves (at best, their proportion in the population explains how much of the population will parrot views carefully constructed by think tanks; but not what those views will be). For that reason, my money is on a combination of the fact that we happen to produce more fossil fuels than essentially any nation not lumped in with the ‘Oh, that country, they make oil, don’t they?’ club; and the fact that enormous-market-failure is not a hypothesis with many friends.
