They'll be ok because they're sitting in air conditioned offices telling the peasants to turn off their lights and air conditioners. If people don't comply they can send out the law enforcement, maybe one day will be robots. Already started happening [1]
I can't track it down in English but there are guidelines people need to follow, turning lights off during certain times and having air conditioners set to > 28c and not at unless required.
Japanese follow rules unlike many other cultures, they won't take these requests lightly and will be pretty uncomfortable doing what they're told.
I dislike this habit of blaming “leaders” in democratic countries. The problem is that the electorate either don’t care or won’t accept anything that might inconvenience them or require them to change their habits. Not much leaders can do in these circumstances.
The electorate's information is limited to what their rulers feed them. When elites decide they want to do something awful, the population starts 80% against it, and over time they're worn down.
You’re not wrong, but also: the electorate’s opinions are shaped by the media they consume. And media is easily bought by disinformation campaigns from oil companies to muddy the waters and convince voters that climate change isn’t a big deal, or is an outright hoax.
You only need to propagandize about 40% of the electorate to completely sink the chances of making real political action on an issue.
Add to that the fact that elected leaders don’t really represent the majority of their “constituents,” they represent the interests of whichever corporations fund them. Democracy has been bought and sold and is controlled by an unaccountable minority, at least in America.
majority of world leaders don't represent the majority of countries responsible for polluting this planet, it's completely irelevant what Europe does if India, China and Indonesia won't care
This ignores the influence Western markets and industry have. Western countries issuing the right kind of regulations would have a global effect. Most dirty industry in the West has been outsourced to those countries anyway.
I think you overestimate influence of Western politicians abroad, we can clearly see how on board is world with sanctioning Russia when it comes to their own interests (almost whole world DGAF about some silly Western sanctions), it's even funnier to think they would hurt their economy for some abstract changed in environment. Have you ever lived in developing Asian or African country?
I think you overestimate influence of Western populations on their own governments.
The point is that Western politicians don't care about the climate catastrophe. For a data point, my own government (Germany) magically conjured up a €100bn emergency defense budget for the Russian war in Ukraine in addition to a promise to boost its defense budget to the NATO recommendation of 2% of GDP (over €70bn in 2020[0]). In contrast, total government budget for "ecological protection" in 2019 was €79bn[1], but more than 2/3rds of that is just waste and water management -- less than €2bn ended up in research and development. The federal budget in 2021 only allocated €2.7bn[2] to the "Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection" either. Even the "The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action" only had a budget of €10.4bn (it was called "... and Energy" at the time).
If German politicans took the climate catastrophe as the world-ending threat serious that it is according to researchers, how come they haven't assigned a similar 2% of GDP or a similar "emergency budget" to preventing it? Instead solar subsidies have been cut, subsidies for sustainable private building development have been slashed and a conservative-led (not even the Greens!) coalition decided to shut down nuclear power in favour of coal and (Russian) gas.
There's no will to address the climate catastrophe among Western governments and there never has been. The only climate action you see are concessions to voter demographics that maintain minimal impact to the economy. Your mistake is to believe that the effects you're seeing are the consequence of politicans in power actually cracking down on something.
FWIW the effect of sanctions, since you mention them, are always delayed and always affect the weakest members of society first. We've already seen moderate capital flight in Russia (e.g. foreign companies extracting their local talent or simply shutting down their Russia offices with mass layoffs). The problem is that much like trickle down economics, "trickle up sanctions" have never been shown to work. Individual seizures of oligarch properties have been vastly more effective than blanket bans that mostly hit the middle and lower classes.
Plus, of course, the sanctions are ridiculous when the same countries enacting those sanctions still pay Russia billions of dollars for resources like gas that they depend on and can't just give up. And of course other countries like China take this opportunity to offer loans and cheap buyouts with zero competition.
They'll be ok because they're sitting in air conditioned offices telling the peasants to turn off their lights and air conditioners. If people don't comply they can send out the law enforcement, maybe one day will be robots. Already started happening [1]
[1] https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan's-june-heatwa...