Other things are going on here.
Denial is a psychological coping mechanism. Liberals believe that government and political action can solve huge problems like climate change without a big change to a comfortable standard of living, so there's a tendency to believe in climate change as a challenge to be overcome. The more radical position on the left is that dealing with climate change will require a fundamental shift in economic/social/ecological relations, and that this is a good thing in itself. To paraphrase JFK, for liberalism (as with the left), man's problems were created by man and can be solved by man. The right's instinct is to doubt both sides of that equation. Conservatives are more skeptical than liberals that, if there is a problem, it can be easily solved, and so it is easier to just ignore the problem altogether or claim it doesn't exist.
Plus people who live in the suburbs and drive minivans, and/or live in states where resource extraction is major industry, fear the brunt of climate change discussion and policy. And the solutions offered for climate change tend to involve taxes/spending an expansion of government generally. People often look at what they do or don't want done, and then accept the beliefs that support that. Chalking it all up to donations from big oil puts the cart before the horse.
To spite liberals, plain and simple.
This and this. It's a complicated and potent mix of bullish*t-populist cultural resentment against urban "eggheads;" a desire to cling to one's unearned privilege and lifestyle and never have to face up to the long-lasting harm said lifestyle is going to cause to those who don't have a say in the system; and just a plain old ideological resistance to the idea that there are some issues where the global repercussions and obvious market failures make activist government necessary.
I mean, obviously fossil fuel power and lobbying doesn't
help, but the problems are too deep-seated to merely pin on a cartoon villain like the Kochs. (And don't get me wrong, they
are villains.) There's serious psychological barriers here that can't just be pinned on an easily-scapegoatable elite. We need to look inside ourselves, too.
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