Climate change deniers are ‘more likely to be racist’, study finds

People who doubt the truth of climate change are more likely to hold racist views, a large-scale study of American attitudes has revealed.

Researcher Salil Benegal at DePauw University analysed data from American National Election Studies and Pew research.

He found that Republicans with the highest level of racial resentment were 84% likely to dispute the idea of man-made climate change.

White Republicans with high scores for racial resentment were three times as likely to disagree with a statement that climate change was real than White Republicans with lower racism scores.

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Benegal told Sierra Club that the phenomenon may be linked to Barack Obama’s policies on the environment.

Benegal says, ‘I’m not trying to make a claim in the study that race is the single most important or necessarily a massive component of all environmental attitudes

‘But it’s a significant thing that we should be looking out for.’