As an Environmental Sciences student, I'm less interested in how virtuous the people in charge are, than a political system that makes acting on climate change far more rewarding than not. The current system makes it so that acting on climate change hurts someone's career in politics.

The (mainly)conservative media (and thereby their viewers) will whine about policy on climate change because muh gas pipeline jobs, even though the damage per such installations cause via greenhouse gas emissions hurts other sectors wherein the job growth is constrained, hurting the entire market worldwide. Fossil fuel doesn't even generate electricity as cheaply as renewable alternatives, which also holds back economic growth which could be used for more investment to protect against climate change. (These people suck at being capitalists.)

It's like paying for jobs that don't create anything of value, like how the nurburgring was created to give people jobs in Germany, instead here they're paying people to burn our houses down, literally in the case of California.