If and when humanity actually takes the level of action needed (Which will probably take nothing less than the deaths of capitalism/neoliberalism tbh, and they ain't goin' anywhere in the foreseeable future), it'll already be far too late.
The feedback loops are active, methane is bursting out of the melting tundra in Siberia. Humanity's ability to even slow down worst case scenario climate change is quickly leaving us. It will take 200 billion to buy 20 years, but nobody with that amount of money is willing to fork that over. Musk and Bezos are spending their money on spaceships and Mars colonies to GTFO Earth and live on their Mars AI-run slave estates.
The world will treat Global Warming like the US treated Covid-19.
Giant lib hot take, but I think Jeff Bezos could save the world if he wanted to, he just doesn't want to. Imagine what $1 billion / year, $10 billion / year in climate change propaganda could do, either coming come Jeff Bezos or a thousand think tanks that he launders it thru. He could "hire" entire chunks of the work force to "work from home" (aka strike). He could set up Amazon to distribute food and supplies to people in the third world that are currently being exploited. A few careful steps and he could liquefy his holdings or switch them to "green" technology. He could fund a dozen or hundreds of politicians to run on something like the Green New Deal. He could actually affect change and dismantle the system, at least put a massive, massive dent into it.
Of course, he would never do any of these things. He either believes he will survive climate change with his money, that it actually isn't a thing (very unlikely; even the oil industry knew), or that he is old enough that it won't affect him directly. The fact that billions will die couldn't matter less to him.
he is old enough that it won’t affect him directly.
He's right then. His money will insulate him from the effects of climate change until he dies.
If there was any justice in the world, he would fall into a vat of sharks that he uses to intimidate his servants with. In minecraft.
Because Mars won't have billions of refugees with a yearning for vengeance.
New Zealand seems like the natural fortress island for the super wealthy since they can sink boats of refugees coming from far off, but can New Zealand hold off forever? Bezos isn't willing to take that risk and Elon wants to be Mars Emperor.
The toothpaste is out of the tube on climate change at this point.
Carbon pollution isn't like toothpaste, it's like used cooking oil.
But fast food places send used cooking oil to be 'recycled'... or is that part of your point?
I spent a couple years engaged in some pretty innocuous (and quite lib) green activism at my university. We did info workshops, replanting what unqualified bureaucrats decided should be torn up, showed up to demos, and just generally tried to get people to give a shit: I know, when grounded in those terms, good luck. All of this came out of either ours or the student pocket - and if you listened at this time, you could hear the beginnings of the liberal capitalist culture blob rising from the ground to replace, redact and just generally make life harder if you're doing anything that doesn't support whatever bullshit UN climate goals they started to parrot as a PR shield. We eventually got dissolved after about four years of people giving less of a shit, right as those 'sectors' of activism became co-opted and effectively a buffer for the institution's ailing rep and quality.
Did I/we do anything that mattered if that time? Almost certainly not. What was 'raising awareness' as a mode to those types of communities has infected most of the orgs that people who care go to. Those people who - wide-eyed undergrads and ex-hippies - get disillusioned or somehow brainwashed into thinking the delicate corp-speak take on greening up their workplaces is anything other than easing to allow companies and industries to launder their nagging indifference, to busy people with bullshit trotskyite-esque minutiae while the planet burns.
Move forward a couple years, as the "warnings" well-meaning scientists and activists have been heaped on society have become normalised and (almost) banal to hear the latest reporting of, it's a herculean fucking task to not go full doomer about the situation and the likely reactions, but it's immensely important. The species isn't going to get wiped out, sure, but that shouldn't be the only thing people can give a shit about.
Not all species, but a whole lot. Bacteria would 100% survive as they survive far more extreme conditions all the time.