I doubt it will ever happen with our system of electing new people every 4ish years, with no consequences after office. That system might work on a small scale for a small time, but not in a global economy like ours.

What we need is a system to tie the direct effects of the actions of politicians to the personal lives of politicians. For example, like doctors, they should be held liable for political malpractice.

We also need to find a way to get people into office who aren't as hungry for wealth and power like most politicians are. Seems like from the start we are setting ourselves up for failure if we elect people who are good at being elected.

Perhaps politics should be like jury duty: it should be more distributed and citizens should have to serve in it.

I had a friend attempt to run for congress ~10 years ago. It eventually got to the point where he had to take ... um, not bribes? investments, yeah, that's the word, in order to continue. There was no other way to afford the marketing required to pull it off.

If you really want 'free' elections, you need to make it so that literally anyone can run instead of only rich people.

Really, the issue is the people who vote for the politicians? If voters supported radical climate policy then elected officials would implement it.

> If voters supported radical climate policy

That is the issue, no one whats to change their life style and people do not like change.

MAGA people will not change, even the many environmental left wing people will not change their life styles all that much. Never mind changing your life style is difficult in many places due to Infrastructure in the US.

So, unless politicians make the hard choices, nothing will be done to address Climate Change in time to even keep under 2C.

My opinion is speculative and not well-informed, but if I had to guess I would say 1) our governments are more or less defacto oligarchies (or at least the politicians are generally on the upper end of the economic spectrum), and 2) because of many social factors this seems to be a real uphill climb, so I can actually sympathize with politicians who on one hand have maybe a vague sense that they won't suffer the worst effects of climate change and on the other don't necessarily have a clear or great path to produce the needed changes.

*sympathize somewhat

The (crude) analogy that comes to mind is something akin to the "checks and balances" of U.S. government, with the head of one checking the ass of the other, but instead everybody's head is under everybody else's ass.