Seventy years after carcentric suburbs started to become popular in North America, and thirty years after the Kyoto Protocol, we’re still dealing with this:

instead of this:

To my mind, this is no surprise.
You can cry about the Earth and Nature and the environment and recycling and blah, blah, blah till you’re blue in the face. You can shoot, and show, film after film about the garbage in the oceans, and species after species going extinct. You can educate, and reason with, people all you want. But all you have to show for decades of such work is mere increments!
Were it not for all the scientists, and the work on governments and political parties, we’d not have even that!

What can you do when the single largest expenditure of the average person is a house, and his/her/per second-largest expenditure is a car! Per entire life is tied into the fossilized status quo! Per works for _years_, if not decades, to pay them off!

Yes, change is happening, but I’ve lost count of the number of point-of-no-return warnings I’ve heard over the decades.
I remember when some treaty or some such was agreed upon, back in the Nineties or even the Eighties. I read a newspaper article which showed the activists being devastated by the compromises; the agreement was nowhere near what they’d sought! Yet, here we are, decades on, with even Kyoto barely implemented by anyone.

The underlying cause for the lack of cycling infrastructure is the same: People’s money is tied into the status quo.

And outdated electoral systems give disproportionate weight to these people.

One must provide a migration path for them that makes money and density for them. Money, because they are in debt, and there’re dollar signs in their eyes due to appreciation; density, because they lack public transportation, with Mom and Dad chauffeuring the kids around!
Infill housing has been one approach: It provides them with a source of income, and it adds density. Unfortunately, it has come quite late. The same property-value paranoia that kept dark-skinned people out has proven to be an obstacle to even this, let alone to tiny houses.

So, here we are, in 2022, with barely any glaciers left, and floods and fires galore. Yet, one can’t even choose to live in a tiny house of one’s own, let alone sully the roads with tiny transportation.