"A Much Deeper Force Is Also at Work"

"Humans aren't well wired to act on complex statistical risks. We care a lot more about the tangible present than the distant future. Many of us do that to the extreme—what behavioral scientists call hyperbolic discounting—which makes it particularly hard to grapple with something like climate change, where the biggest dangers are yet to come.
"Our mental space is limited and we aren't primed to focus on abstruse topics. Except for a small fraction that are highly motivated, most voters know little about the ins and outs of climate change, or the policy options relating to it. Instead, voters' opinions about such things derive from heuristics such as political party affiliation and basic ideology."

In the Los Angeles Times, David G. Victor, Nick Obradovich, and Dillon J. Amaya argue that "the wiring of our brains makes it hard to stop climate change."