Conservatism does not have a mechanism for dealing with long-term problems. They can't plant trees, so to speak.

Their philosophy is to conserve the existing (or revert to previous) normative social and economic hierarchies. That means, for the most part, God over man, men over women, rich over poor, white over black, straight over LGBT and the maintenance of historical privelles generally. If you've ever wondered how social and economic conservative get along, this is why, they're both trying to conserve these hierarchies but just with a different focus, they largely try to preserve the hierarchy they find themselves highest up in.

It's why the quote from Lydon Johnson is still relevant "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.".

This gets at the heart of it, this 'lowest white man', unprivelleged economically, can be made to conserve the rich-poor hierarchy of the economic conservative by exploiting his prejudice towards the racial white-black social conservative hierarchy.

We've seen that strategy extended to other hierarchies as well.

When the solutions to problems can not be found in these hierarchies, conservatives will not reject the hierarchy they will reject the solutions and even reality itself.
They reject public health because it provides service to the poor and rich, white and black, men and women, religious and heathen. Public health violates the hierarchies. Similar to global warming. It simply can't be real because the solutions involve violating or otherwise rejecting the hierarchies.