> "believe the science" =/= "a mass social movement to tackle climate change"

A "social movement", going to "rallies" with the correct signs, is not going to tackle climate change. There is more than enough will for significant political action and has been for a some time. I repeat, the enemy is not your redneck boogyman somehow orchestrating everything you think is going wrong with the world, it is your politicians who have repeatedly promised you just need to elect them to solve your problems while never having the slightest intention of doing so.

> imminent threat of terrorism is a powerful motivator.

There wasn't an imminent threat of terrorism from any of the many recent catastrophic wars and interventions around the middle east and north africa. Fewer people bought that line than want action on climate change.

> abstract threat of lifestyle change in a few decades isn't.

Lots of people think we have an imminent threat from climate change. Do you have a source for the claim that more people believed the lies that Iraq posed an imminent threat of terrorism?

> 1. the alternative would be an even worse recession, so it was the lesser of two evils.

That was the claim of course by the politicians who are owned by banks (e.g., https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html). Most likely a lie, certainly the actual response implemented was costly unpopular and terrible compared to what could have been done.

And I just listed a few examples of cases where politicians have no problems implementing costly unpopular agenda regardless of what the people want. It was not supposed to be a scientific exact same situation, this is missing the point.

> source?

Well it's common knowledge. Again this is missing the point, don't worry if you don't know the exact details of all the examples or they don't match 100% exactly with climate change. They're just examples of unpoular costly things politicians do all the time. It's not hard to come up with them.

But if you're interested these were among the first 4 links on google

https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/article...

"Over the past three decades, research on immigration policy-making has flourished. To explain why so-called ‘Western liberal democracies’ have liberalized immigration despite popular demands for restriction, scholars have pointed at the democratic character of these states. Freeman (1995) argued that immigration policy-making in democracies follows the pattern of ‘client politics’ because the costs of immigration are diffused among the entire electorate, while benefits are concentrated within a small pool of entrepreneurs."

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publicat...

"To begin with, the very fact of immigration creates a central puzzle for democratic theory: For several decades, most Western countries have had high and rising levels of immigration even though a majority of their populations consistently want immigration to stabilize or decrease. This public sentiment has been apparent since the early 1960s, when survey researchers first began to investigate the question of immigration. " [and actual survey numbers follow in table 1]