Needs a Hail Mary event for humanity to work together
Humanity has overcome many things by working together. Much of humanity is already working together to overcome climate change. In fact, if the Republican Party in the US would get to work on it, that may be a sufficient fraction of humanity. And if the US led on it, more would participate.
It is kind of depressing, really. We can't even agree on not killing each other. I mean, no one wants to get killed right, and the solution to this is the simplest there is, we just need to collectively decide not to kill. And if we did that, just consider how much resources it would free up: military, security, no need to rebuild what war has destroyed if there is no war.
So if we can't simply decide not to kill each other even though it would be a net, immediate benefit, how deciding to care for climate, which will involve at least a global reduction in comfort for many years before things get better is going to work?
It has gone on for all of history, yet people working together have mostly eliminated it - exactly what you say. It has gone on for all of history, and most of what humans have acheived by working together have been done contemporaneously with it.
https://www.sciencealert.com/modern-life-may-be-pushing-huma...
The ones who actively prevent collective measures to stop the climate change are the richest of the rich. And they also spend pretty significant money on lies and propaganda designed to prevent collective work against climate change.
Can we pay our way out of it? If we could it would be to direct our actions towards things like nature restoration rather than anything that could directly increase consumption. In fact it would actively decrease production and reduce consumption by sucking direct resources out of the market economy. Yes, you are being paid to fix some problems but also pulling our of manufacturing thus increasing the prices of almost everything you purchase.
But that is a part of the idea behind planned degrowth. Use the system to actively scale down consumption before ecological and resource constraint blow back forces it. Better to be proactive than reactive.
This is why things like the Dark Mountain project came about - https://dark-mountain.net/about/
This idea is to be like serotinous plants. Seeds and cones that can only open up when the fires come through to melt the resin that holds them shut. In a way this is what the Solar punk movement is all about. Depict, advocate and produce futures that will out last the 'line goes up' society.
But when it comes to climate action it really seems like scale and latency has really hidden the full scale of the issue.
It is so big that few if any people really comprehend the hyper object and the systemic nature of it. It is so slow to show up direct results that most can ignore it short term.
I have said that the right lives in denial and the left lives in delusion. The right say it isn't at thing or it isn't a big issue. The left tend to seek technical solutions that aren't all that. Near me is a mural of Greta Thunberg that was put up in 2020, it calls for "Net zero by 2025." that was never going to happen on a time scale like that.
As for the Republicans changing the tastes of the world, unfortunately the one thing that Trump has done very well the last decade is burn through any sense of trust of the nation. Regardless of everything else, trust is the one resource you do not want to run out of, it is the foundation on which everything else sits.