Reason is slave to the passions. If it doesn't resonate at an emotional level we don't care. It doesn't matter if we understand. We also have to give a fuck, and clearly we don't.

People by and large understand and ask for and vote for solutions to this.

The various comments here blaming "people" are a mix of victim blaming and cover-up for the well organized forces that have held the democratic will back for decades and despite (or because of?) this, the agents of this tragedy are very popular around these parts.

>People by and large understand and ask for and vote for solutions to this.

They really haven't, no. Corporations don't want to take responsibility for their actions, governments don't want to, and big surprise: individuals don't want to either.

USA:

Polling shows that US voters favor climate bills – yet assume fellow Americans don’t

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/01/us-vot...

UK:

> The UK has some of the highest levels of concern regarding the climate emergency in the world with 81 per cent of people ‘believing’ in the climate emergency, with over three-quarters (77 per cent) saying we must do ‘everything necessary, urgently as a response’.

https://www.ippr.org/blog/as-some-politicians-seek-to-divide...

I've read those numbers, and my anecdotal experience more or less corresponds to them. I know plenty of people who acknowledge climate change and think it is serious.

They've all had their whole lives to make climate conscious lifestyle decisions, they could all stop eating meat tomorrow, but they ain't done squat. Not as individuals nor as a group. The few who have are weirdos who live at the margins.

Putting the burden on invididuals for averting the climate crisis is a form victim-blaming. It’s long been clear that only concerted collective action will be effective in producing real change.

This is why so many free-market, minimal-state absolutists are so prone to putting their fingers in their ears and pretending climate change is not a problem, or if it is, that individuals as free agents are responsible for creating it and therefore fixing it. They cannot accept the logical conclusion of the necessity of state action, as it contradicts their core beliefs.

For even longer it's been clear that any collective (or state for that matter) is made up entirely of individuals. In this case millions of individuals who can't help but give tens of thousands of dollars to the fossil fuel industry each year. You don't get to dedicate your life to that kind of wanton destruction and then turn around and claim that you're some kind of a victim.

Not acknowledging that the current predicament is caused by every single human being except maybe native tribes in remote islands is blindness. Saying that the vast majority (%99.9) of human beings is responsible and to be blamed for it is not victim-blaming, but not right either. The thing to blame is our beloved technology. Technology is the main force which shapes human society. We do things and don't do things because of our technology. It defines societies and the entire human civilization. The only choice there was was to oppose all technological progress, but that ship has sailed long ago, in 15th century or so. Back then, few people understood what technological progress will inevitably bring, no one had a time machine to see 21th and 22th centuries. We tout these people as religious backward luddites today, though the sentiment is changing.

The whole situation is as deterministic as two celestal bodies moving according to Newtonian physics. Technological progress was inevitable, and so was the resulting population bomb in the last century, and so is the nearing Collapse of the civilization in the coming decades, due to ecological overshoot. Read the Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.