[Al-Khwarizmi]

The public outcry that you mention is not even close to large enough.

Sure, everyone is for reducing pollution and against climate change in the abstract, but then in my country coal miners rally (successfully) to avoid their mines getting shut down, drivers complain when car lanes or parking space are replaced with bike lanes or sidewalk, half of the population buys diesel cars to save a few bucks, many go to live in suburbs and plan their life around the car, and people give close to zero weight to environmental proposals in elections.

There are countries with more environmental consciousness than mine (I'm from Spain and sadly it's very far from being a model country in this...), but anyway, public outcry is worthless if it is hypocritical and near the bottom of people's list of priorities.

By the way, the answer to your question is that elections provide a great way of incentivizing long-term thinking in politicians: just don't vote those that don't exhibit it. It's the voters' fault if we don't take that into account and instead vote based on stuff like "unemployment has gone down 2% in the last 4 years" (probably more due to global trends and long-term decisions of previous administrations than to whatever the current one recently did...)