All the different subjects that you’ve mentioned can be split into two group – those that are determined by fact and those that are determined by opinion.
Governments can, and often do, go against the groundswell of public opinion; often because they believe that they’re right. You can neither prove nor disprove that either side is right – at least not at the time.
A government can’t go against something that has already been scientifically proven. They can cover it up and pretend it doesn’t exist. This is precisely what the US government did with global warming. In 1961 the US Military undertook scientific research at Camp Century in Greenland and concluded that the world was unnaturally warming, the Kennedy Government buried the report and cut any further funding (to be fair, the full implications weren’t understood back then).
Different governments did the same thing. The Carter Administration buried the JASONs report “The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate (reference JSR-78-07)” because they didn’t want to face up to global warming. It was the same Administration that also buried “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment” AKA The Charney Report. Reagan did exactly the same thing following the NAS’s publication of “Changing Climate”, in his own words he didn’t want climate change to “become a stick to beat America with” so he prevented publication of the report and took the side of the one dissenting voice – that of Bill Nierenberg who stated that global warming was real but that we’d adapt to it.
Of course, even though successive governments can deny the truth, there comes a time when they can’t hide it any longer. For the US this came in about 1988 when global warming made it into the spotlight of the international political arena.
Twenty-five years on and the evidence has become so overwhelming that there isn’t a single government in the world that disputes global warming is happening. If they did, they would become a global laughing stock and target of worldwide derision. An example can be seen with Sarah Palin when she announced that global warming wasn’t happening, I’m not sure that the US media accurately reflected the level of vitriol and hatred that the rest of the world displayed toward her, I’ve certainly never seen anything like it before.
The other thing you have to remember is that the US is not representative of the rest of the world when it comes to the subject of climate change. In the US it’s very much a political issue and many people oppose the theory of climate change based more on their political leanings than anything else. A consequence of this is that there are more skeptics in the US than elsewhere – ten times the global average. Globally 90% of people see global warming as either a “serious” or a “very serious” threat (6% see it as a minor threat, 2% don’t see it as a threat at all, 2% have no opinion).
Even in the US, the most sceptical country of all, the skeptics are still a relatively small minority (21%).
So not only have the government got to content with incontrovertible scientific proof, but they also have to appeal to the majority of the electorate and increasing demands from the rest of the world. The US has already seen what happens when it ignores global demands to deal with climate change – the collapse of the car industry being one such example.