A year or so ago, I suggested a thought experiment in which it was known that the Chinese were developing a weapon that could do hundreds of billions of dollars of damage to the US (the exact amount wasn’t known) every year. How would the Trump Administration react to such news? With some sort of crash program involving billions of dollars of public money, of course. Protecting the country from foreign military threats is not negotiable with the GOP, regardless of cost.
Climate change has the same potential impact, but is not caused by weapons. The GOP consequently either denies it is occurring or simply refuses to do anything about it on the grounds that to do so would increase the size of the state and unduly burden businesses.
What you should take away from this is that, in the final analysis, it isn’t limiting the size of the state, or even protecting the public, that truly matters to the GOP. If you can’t blow something up, there isn’t any point in spending public money to deal with it. In other words, the swaggering militarism of the GOP is really the most important part of its DNA.