Ideally their primary obligation should be to act in the long-term best interests of the citizens of the country.
Sure, and most of my objection to climate anything is pragmatic. Climate change policy is an infinite money pit that promises to deliver bugger-all, 3 or 4 generations from now. It is the wet dream of those hollow men, able to leech off government grant money for decades knowing full well that nobody will be able to notice the lack of results until long after they're dead. If it can be noticed at all.
It is not obvious to me that it is in our best long-term interests to cut emissions rather than, I dunno, let coastal insurance rates rise in an organic manner. We've eliminated most of the smog, most of the water is drinkable (outside Flint). We hit the low-hanging fruit decades ago and have run out of obviously-productive ways we can spend money on environmentalism.
Actually I've been recently sold on one measure: Allegedly if we protect ~15% of the continental shelves from fishing, that should be all we need to keep fish stocks sustainable.
Climate change is an existential threat to our species, and if our species wasn't demonstrably moronic, we would prioritize fixing it asap. Countries that cannot fix it alone should be pressuring others to contribute, and essentially prepping as nations for an extremely hostile future.
Just because hollow men corrupt climate change initiatives like they corrupt everything else, it does not invalidate the underlying physics or the magnitude of the problem.
Just because hollow men corrupt climate change initiatives like they corrupt everything else
Granted, but the only way to reliably constrain the hollow men is with clear, simple, improvements in the not-too-distant future. Goals for which failure is clear and undeniable, preferably before a reelection campaign can get underway.
Climate change is an existential threat to our species
Personally I find this line of argument unconvincing. Either the forecast is incredibly underwhelming (a degree or two of temperature difference, sometime next century, maybe), or else spins perfectly natural cycles as a cataclysm which must be halted. This feels a lot like throwing a wrench into a complicated set of gears trying to make it stop and instead risk it tearing itself to bits, although I acknowledge that you perceive industrialization as a wrench already making gears grind.
The whole thing comes across like climate activists are saving us from climate change in a manner very similar to how Trudeau is saving truckers from covid.
Regions will be rendered inhospitable and people will have to move? People act like that hasn't been happening since the dawn of history. We'll sort it out when we get there, if it happens at all. And no, "now" is not the time for sorting out the distant problems of whether the beach is 1' shorter in 2040.
Ideally their primary obligation should be to act in the long-term best interests of the citizens of the country. Environmental protection should be an important part of that.
Of course most modern governments seem to be composed of hollow men who talk nonsense while helping powerful corporations increase their profits by shitting on everything.