In a similar vein to yours, I thought that once the effects of climate change became obvious and catastrophic--like massive flooding, regular anomalous heat waves, people dying in the Imperial Core obvious and catastrophic--society at large would have an "oh shit" moment and start taking the climate crisis seriously. I thought it would likely be too late to avert the worst impacts by then, but that we'd see a quick heel turn of public opinion.

Hurricane Sandy shook that belief a bit, and COVID annihilated it. It turns out I wildly overestimated people's ability to take even mild precautions in the face of obvious, directly harmful consequences. If we couldn't get the large majority of people on board with masking--a basically costless precaution for a very clear and easy to understand harm--there's no way we're going to get people to change their lifestyles in the significant ways necessary to avoid the very worst climate scenarios, which result from the operation of a system that is much harder to understand and are themselves much less immediately obvious to the average person. The American people (and the western world generally) will bake themselves alive while also drowning, and insist the whole time that nothing is actually happening.