It's not the 'general public' that makes the rules and any one individual doing what they can isn't going to make a whole lot of difference as long as industry is exempted (which it is in plenty of places). Thanks for the edit, appreciated.
Sure, but the urge of avoiding self-imposed extinction can change the political agenda and the regulations. I think we saw that for nuclear warheads (compare now vs the 60s), and (in the wrong sense) for nuclear power too. We’re sort of seeing it in the EU for AI right now!
Of course the problem is that those feel like problems that could kill you or your kids, while climate change doesn’t. But again, that’s also connected to message formulation and correctly communicating the feeling of urgency…
That depends on who you talk to. But, to make it simple: if COVID19, which arguably was a far smaller problem than climate change (even though it isn't gone and never will be gone), I think you can see that the degree of lack of global policy and unity while dealing with that is any precursor of what our approach to climate change is (and has been so far) that we're royally fucked. You can't solve global problems with local policies, especially not if those local policies undo each others' effects.
In a quite real sense the general public does decide the rules through representative demoracy in western countries, and the ignorance and complacency of votersin this respect arguably result chiefly from failures in communication.
That is true in the abstract. But in practice people are - usually - not single issue voters and on paper at least almost all political parties that you could vote for have some climate fig leaf in their party program. And that's as far as most people's political interest goes.
Attempts to communicate these 'uncomfortable truths' and their ultimately utterly predictable outcome unfortunately have to deal with the fact that the consequences are conveniently over the horizon for pretty much everybody of voting age today. There may be some mild discomfort but unless you happen to live in regions where there are already concrete troubles today you can easily ignore the problem.
And so people do just that: they ignore the problem, because it doesn't affect them. Yet.
And by the time it does it will be too late. This is how you get into very bad situations. Democracy is ill suited to deal with this sort of challenge (though it works well for lots of other kinds of problems). As is capitalism. And yet, those are the two main building blocks most of the developed West are constructed out of. And we're not even close to wanting to let either one or both of these go to deal with climate change.
