Well, first, we need to decide if the average person is expected to have to take personal initiative (i.e. over and above what is actually required of them by society / law) in order for this problem to be solved. If that's the situation, we can safely assume a solution won't be forthcoming because, on the whole, most people will not do more than they need to.

If we do need people to step it up, we have to ensure that we're not losing credibility. July has been a cool, wet month where I live, certainly not as warm as last year, so when we get articles saying "IT'S A CLIMATE EMERGENCY, HOTTEST MONTH EVER", and meanwhile I'm sending my kids off to school / daycare with sweatshirts in case the cloud cover sticks around... yeah. I can recognize the data, and I can believe that overall things are hotter, but it's not meshing up with personal experience, and so it makes it bloody difficult to, say, leverage my finances in order to buy an electric car (when my reasonably-efficient gas car is working fine and has decades of useful life left), and so forth.

"Climate emergency" rhetoric is simply going to burn everyone out and get laughed at, even if it's true.

I think we should focus more on changes that don't require individual action over and above the norm. Legislating a new normal is hard, but more productive than voluntary change.