That’s aggregate deaths one at a time, though. If all the car deaths happened all at once in a localized area and took out half of Rhode Island, it would spur action.
Almost all politicians are also owned by the car and oil industries, so that would explain the lack of action with the high number of RTCs.
First, one of the most popular arguments against action addressing climate change has been that climate change is simply fake. A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective.
The gun control debate in the United States is linked with people's perceptions of personal agency. Often, a mass casualty event perpetrated with a gun is ended by a gun being used on the perpetrator (sometimes, it's the perpetrator killing themselves, and sometimes it's police killing them). Many people imagine it would be possible to end those events as a bystander with a gun. But I think that it would be much harder to get people to fantasize about being a hero that stops a mass casualty event resulting from extreme heat. Such an event starts and ends when Mother Nature says it does, and it seems like it should be pretty clear to people that the only way personal agency is relevant is in the act of preparing the environment.
I would have bought this 10 years ago. But following the recent rise of conspricism, especially far out things like Qanon and Pizza Gate, I've come to realize that it's possible for vast numbers of people to just decide to believe something is/isn't true because it suits them.
The Trump administration has banned the use of bump stocks, devices that let rifles fire like machine guns, after promising to do so earlier this year.
It's true that our system of government and industry is set up to preserve itself and resist sweeping change. It is further true some incredibly wealthy and influential individuals within the system are aligned with those goals, making change all the more difficult and unlikely (this applies to climate change as it does to gun laws, car culture, throw-away consumerism, etc). It is a mistake to equate trying and failing to change massive and powerful institutions with doing nothing.
I get it, from a cynical and pessimistic perspective, doing nothing vs trying hard but failing to do something all looks the same in the end (when society is roasting canned spam on it's own embers, as we might imagine). But fatalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and mostly appeals because it has the "benefit" of requiring no action of the individual. Just a lifetime of depression, apathy, and/or moral bankruptcy.
Even if the fatalist is wrong, it means people made things work out for them in the end and they didn't even have to lift a finger. What a deal! It certainly has its appeal to those parts of our brain that we share with lizards and other creatures that look to avoid personal risk and conserve energy at almost any cost.