They are actually but whenever you mention it the usual reply is along the lines of "that's for the government to worry about" When their houses, those houses in the rural woods with all the glorious trees right up to the exterior walls burn down and insurance builds them a new one, maybe they'll take construction materials and landscaping design a little more seriously. It certainly won't stop them from driving miles and miles into town to get a quart of milk.
Yeah, people in rural California are finding out about that.
But it's not just bad landscaping doing it. Hotter dryer conditions, lack of groundwater, pests that previously were kept at bay by colder winters now killing trees, high winds causing power lines to short out and spreading wildfires further - global warming is making everything worse.
I grew up on a farm 30 miles out of town. We went to the nearest gas station once a week for milk and bread, and into town once a month for supplies. When I got a job in town I lived across the street from work, and didn't own a car until after the management insisted that I get a driver's license.
Back in the 1960's stuff was expensive but made to be repaired, and didn't come wrapped in plastic. products took a long time to get here from overseas via efficient sea transport, and nobody except the rich flew anywhere. Long road trips were a big deal, taken maybe once a year if ever. The population was much lower too. Our carbon footprint was lower back then. With the modern technology we have today it could be
much lower, without a significant drop in living standards.
It's willful ignorance. The information is out there it just takes a little digging. The media likes to report on all the fluff that's not going to make a whit of difference in the grand scheme of things.
There's willful ignorance for sure, but that's no excuse not to get the message out loud and clear.
What we need is a 'road map' like we had with Covid. It was a lot easier to handle being locked down when you knew what progress was being made. We should be doing the same with GHG emissions. We need to know exactly how much to reduce emissions and where, and what the measures currently being applied are doing to meet that. Ideally there would be a dashboard tracking it on a daily or weekly basis that everyone can monitor. Then when we are not meeting the goals we can insist on more being done.
Actually, that's not true people flew everywhere and put up with the restrictions and quarantine on arrival.
It was true in New Zealand. Many tourists were stranded here because we wouldn't let them fly out. But we only shut down for a few weeks, after which the virus was completely eliminated. We then had a whole year of virus-free normal life with a booming economy - until we made the fatal mistake of letting Australia into our 'bubble'. The second lock down was a disaster due to the new strain being much more infectious and a few people who refused to comply spreading it. We couldn't stamp it out, and had to rely on vaccinations. Then Omicron hit. Those more infectious strains wouldn't have developed if everyone had done what we did (and before you say "But New Zealand's an isolated little island,
we couldn't do that - remember that China did it too, even though they are on a continent and the virus
started there).
However this doesn't apply to global warming. We could allow a large number of people get away with not complying and still have a good result. If only we could communicate this fact there might be a lot less opposition.
Many, many kitchens got remodelled...
... and my house got the best 'spring clean' it will ever get. Many families discovered how much 'quality time' they were missing by having to be at work and school etc. My bother says he got more done working from home than he did at the office! It was quite surreal to hear only the sound of wildlife and the occasional DIY construction noise (reminded me of being back on the farm, so peaceful!).
The surprising thing is how quickly people adapted to the 'draconian' rules. Most weren't stressed because the government paid employers to keep their wages coming in, and 'essential workers' kept the supermarket shelves full. For most of us it was like a paid holiday (Not me though, as a 'casual' worker I got nothing! Luckily I got an 'essential' job which paid enough to keep the wolf from the door).
When disaster strikes people forget their fears and pull together to get through it. Coivid-19 was a good trial run for the
real disaster we faced here last year. In this case it wasn't rules that stopped us from traveling, but the bridges, roads and railway lines being washed out. What's worse is the power was out too, luckily only for one day in my street but others were without electricity for up to 3 weeks. Couldn't get fuel either because pumps don't work when the power's off and looters stole the backup generators!
If we don't voluntarily cut emissions Mother Nature will do it for us. When 'natural' weather destroys roads we won't be able to drive our cars. When crops fail that land we cleared will be useless. When our homes go under water or burn to the ground our remodeled kitchens will be destroyed. Wouldn't it be much better to get off fossil fuels
now, before we have to face that? But we won't, because that would be preempting a threat rather than just reacting to a disaster. Humans are generally too selfish and lazy to think that far ahead.
But we do learn. The response to the next potential pandemic will be much swifter and stronger. Each community that gets hit by a climate disaster will be more receptive to doing whatever is necessary to fix it. Eventually the Luddites will be drowned out by the rest of us dealing to global warming. There will be hardships, but people in Western countries won't suffer
that much.
Of course poor people in 3rd world countries will die like flies. But people dying due to you not cutting back on GHG emissions is OK. Nobody will be called a murderer for doing something that they
know will cause those deaths, because they can just deny it. Imagine some other situation where this was true. "Why yes, my car engine did spew all that oil out onto the road, and those other vehicles did slip and crash causing people to die - but you can't prove there's a connection! And besides, I couldn't afford to fix the oil leak so I
had to drive it like that. How would I live without a car? Vehicular Mobility is my god-given right!"
....red meat is the problem from a climate and water standpoint 
