It would be like expecting people who dump their industrial waste upstream in a river to be corrected by market forces - the market will probably choose that people don’t care about the down river people as long as they get their goods slightly cheaper.
Also a wrinkle in a pure market based solution is that the US substantially subsidizes fossil fuels because I think the 70’s taught politicians that fuel price shocks will get them voted out immediately. https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
> I think most people believe there are more dire issues that need fixing and funding.
No, they're stuck in a shitty system that doesn't allow them to price resources according to their externalities. People aren't going to opt to pay more for fossil fuels than they have to because it would require a critical mass of buy-in. The only solution is taxation, but that doesn't work either because the system offers no safety nets and gasoline suddenly jumping to $20/gallon (which is what it should cost now) would be financially devastating to citizens.
Markets work great at lower populations, and now we're beginning to see their failure modes when population has skyrocketed and rampant resource consumption causes existential damage. Everyone knows it's a problem, but there's no systemic way of solving it.
We're now at a point in humanity where supply and demand alone are insufficient mechanisms to organize an economy.