If humans really are causing climate change, nothing appreciable will be done until there is no choice - that's by and large how people operate unfortunately.
If by people you mean the 30-40% of any given population that will fight tooth and nail against anyone telling them what to do, I agree.
Not everyone is opposed to climate change action. Those that are are loud and fight hard for power. We need to remember that. At one point it felt hopeless to take on the tobacco industry.
It's 30-40% of the population that opposes the token non-solutions that have been proposed by liberal governments. A lot more than that would oppose the drastic economic measures that would be necessary to really avert climate change.
Thing is, Greenpeace started to work on green development in the eighties, along with several leftist faculty and think tanks. Now, thirty odd years later, liberals have a nice thirty year head start and the solutions we know will work are optimized in accordance with liberal values, that is higher taxes and a better live for everybody. If you don't like that, well you solve problems with the solutions you have, not with the solutions you want.
Yes, by itself these will not be enough. However, in Kyoto the international community agreed that there is a problem, in Paris the international community set (self imposed, not enough and non binding) targets for emissions. It will need several additional steps into the same direction to get a workable framework, and that will hopefully happen over the next decade. The (American) right will not like any of these steps, but they did not propose any alternative, it could have been possible to find market based solutions and respect national sovereignty more, or rely on the virtue of small communities etc., but these proposals were simply not developed.
Aside from that, if the conservatives would like to propose a new solution then I and most other people are all ears, but all we seem to get is denial that the problem exists.
"Conservative" is a somewhat meaningless term in this context. On one hand, it's conservative to continue with business as usual and ignore potential problems until they become unavoidable. However, it would also be conservative to keep CO2 levels in the atmosphere at their current levels, instead of running a radical climate experiment in which they are pumped up to ever higher levels.
But . . . substantial effort is already being put in globally. Not enough by far, but much more than zero. This would seem to put the lie to your claim that nothing will be done until there is no choice, by contradiction.
Not everyone is opposed to climate change action. Those that are are loud and fight hard for power. We need to remember that. At one point it felt hopeless to take on the tobacco industry.