There are lots of people who use public transit in my city, they just don’t live in the suburbs.

They’d have to tear down all the tall trees in the neighbourhood to make room for the power poles. There’s no way in hell the car-centric folks who live here would approve of that!

When you walk down the sidewalk around my street you walk in the shade of these trees most of the time. Replacing those trees with ugly power poles and overhead wires would ruin the character of the neighbourhood.

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”

― Jean-Luc Picard

Sometimes we get stuck in local extrema. The biggest challenge facing the human race is not climate change, it’s collective action. Simply put, we’re unable to cooperate effectively enough on a large scale to be able to deal with these sorts of problems.

My city could invest billions of dollars in building a fully electric streetcar transit network and climate change could still proceed largely unabated due to the actions of other people in other areas. In that scenario, my city ends up losing because climate change happened and we wasted all that money on a system that didn’t stop climate change. This is the worse possible outcome so the rational thing (on an individual level, see game theory) to do is avoid it by doing nothing.