Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean

Nation-wise, all the biggest culprits (US/EU) and a good number of the biggest present and future contributors to climate change are democracies.

You do not get to shift collective responsibility onto some "powers that be": Those powers are you and me.

The problem is neither that people don't know about climate change, nor that "greedy corporations" prevent us from acting-- the central problem is that people, in general, don't want to sacrifice cheap fuel, electricity and high living standards now for a better future-- not even a little bit.

Thats it. You can see this in literally every discussion on environmentalism in basically every election. People only want clean energy as long as they don't have to pay a single dime extra for it.

I have not solution for this, but blaming corporations is most certainly not gonna solve this problem (if anything, it's making things worse).

Others might have other models in mind, but it's a cop-out to say "oh well, we've tried bourgeois democracy and it was inevitably corrupted by capitalist interest, I guess we're all out of ideas..."

This is not my point. I think most western democracies do exactly what voters want against climate change: Nothing that would cost extra.

Effective policies to curb CO2 emissions are numerous and pretty obvious: Get rid of combustion engines, phase out fossil fuels from electricity generation, scale up electric grid interconnectivity and storage, lower emissions in steel/concrete production.

Voters are mostly not against those policies, but as soon as there are visible costs (fuel/vehicle/construction/electricity costs rising) or minor inconvenience (vehicle range) any progress gets firmly stopped.

I don't see how another form of government would help in any way-- the eco-communists would just get toppled before they could get anything done.

People have to be forced to act in their best interest.