I mean, I wouldn't say that we as a species lack the collective willpower to bring about broad social change. I think that it's very difficult to get that power

I mean, I wouldn't say that we as a species lack the collective willpower to bring about broad social change. I think that it's very difficult to get that power on the ground with any traction when you have mixed messages coming from both sides of something that is always framed as a debate. For decades, climate change was studied, warned about, and yet the way it was referred to and is still referred to by some like so: "more news regarding the debate on climate change" rather than "more news regarding climate change" — as long as it's a debate, it's undecided, you don't know if you should do something or care because the scientific community has yet to reach consensus, and government inaction is seen as a reflection of this apparent lack of consensus rather than simply governments' unwillingness to go against the grain of business and the comfortable status quo. Even though the rhetoric surrounding climate change does seem to consider it a fact as of the last few years, you still have "experts" on both sides of the fence saying that it is and isn't real, which further enables people to put it out of their mind as something that's for other people to worry about because they're not in on it. And for those who do accept that climate change is a reality, I wouldn't mind betting that a non-trivial subset of those people largely think it's too late to do anything urgent or drastic and are therefore content to endure some bizarre weather while society slowly transitions to eco-friendly models in the next fifty years. It probably couldn't have gone much better, and if big bad business was truly all powerful, I doubt we would have seen any changes in society, but business has also driven the R&D of more efficient solar technology and the rapid expansion of wind power installations. I think the crowd that consider wind farms to be a blight on the landscape have mostly gone quiet after realising that J. M. W. Turner probably wouldn't have wanted to paint electricity pylons, freeways or Airbuses either, yet they're here to stay. I'm surprised geothermal didn't take off, though I probably shouldn't be surprised given that I know practically nothing about geothermal power extraction and thus have an overly simplistic model of a magma steam engine system in my head that probably isn't at all viable or efficient.