I found myself shaking my head too much to really give the essay a good read, not for anything off point, mostly for the author missing important aspects that goes to the heart of inaction - NIMBY and the greater presence of the poorly informed who are more prone to big dollar propaganda. Not all propaganda is direct or blunt, much is subtle ... insidious.
This means along with the rise of the anti science cult, it's been too easy to direct inaction on climate change, as the claims of what has recently been observed is supposedly / actually part of a large natural cycle, for which mankind has little means to change. Of course most anyone who was old enough to either notice first hand or read about changes in the weather in the weeks after 9/11 with the grounding of aircraft, has good reason to question that noise.
The nagging issue though I feel is clarity over which steps should be taken in the journey out of the maze forward to reach the goal. The broad path to the goal of tackling the rise of pollution / climate change doesn't need to be well lit, as purposeful, as-accurate-as-can-be signposts are sufficient. As such more often than not, the clarity is missing when communities, industry and govt are deciding what and where those signposts should be, and which steps are actually purposeful going forwards - popular choices proposed too often in the past, have been feel good aimed at the voting public and big businesses and have perhaps without realising fully, put most of the of burden of implementing it onto a small minority, very much outside the industrial complex and urban life where a majority of a western population lives.
As for Australia, at least with the latest government, there's been a good push towards solar and provided enough inertia to keep going regardless of the naysayers and fossil and nuclear interests that exist here. When it comes to matters of reining in land clearing and improving biodiversity most of the public here will think of all that clearing grain growers and cattle farmers have been done and still doing, despite most of the biodiverity being along coastlines, and good portions being cleared wholesale by land developers for residential suburbs, and not a mention of the massive clearing coal mining in Queensland has done to the immediate climate - the hot black open coal pits create large heat bubbles during the day, which have hindered the natural progression of the large summer tropical storms moving west to east and out to sea over the Great Barrier Reef - now the storms are shunted north or south by these bubbles on a much longer track out to sea by which time most have rained themselves out.