I think it's generational, and it will get better in the 2030-2040s at the latest, when millennials become the dominant generation. The ethos of climate awareness is simply not present enough in previous generations, the seeds were simply too few, too weak, too late. They quite literally were not born in a world where 'it' was a thing.
Here's my other comment below for details.[1]
This is compoundd by the fact that "professional politicians" feel compelled/incentivized to lie over and over again in their career, and it becomes easier and easier to lie as you do it — kind of a psychological response to cognitive dissonance, a defense mechanism. Survival instinct, at this level, is definitely individual, internal, and may completely shut down or even oppose the survival of the country, civilization, species. You just lie your way out to save yourself and your family and friends, and to hell with everyone and everything else because you're not super(wo)man. So human.
The kind of collective instinct for survival (what Jung would probably have called a collective form of consciousness, that is opened to others, bigger-than-each-of-us) that is required for such higher-level evolution (civ, species) is more generational, imho.
This is all mostly deduced/hypothesized from sociology and political science studies, with a tad of psychology etc. I mean, I haven't found much contradictory arguments to these apparent "truths", however unable we feel to explain them. It takes generations to meaningfully evolve civilizational paradigms, there's just no speeding up history in that regard. We merely leap forward big time when conditions are ripe and a particularly exceptional figure (or group thereof) manages to steer things "the right way" — one of these.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955196