Politicians propagate a message of pushing humans to live beyond the means of their environment. We've already started the sixth extinction event and people are still ignoring the elephant in the room.

Most tax dollars are spent on war, social services, and policy enforcement with little concern for mass infrastructure expansion. Because of this, our population growth has been exceeding infrastructure. This increases the cost of living and lowers the standard of living while damaging the ecology. It also increases the stress levels of the general public because they're now always under pressure to pay top dollar for crappy public utilities/services.

As long as population growth doesn't exceed infrastructure expansion it should be fine. We don't do that currently because of NIMBYism, apathy, greed, and shortsightedness. Nobody is willing to be temporarily inconvenienced to have infrastructure built near them (or be displaced) nor are they willing to spend tax dollars to build it.

This is the root cause of most of humanities problems (overcrowding, crime, poverty, starvation, etc...) but it is never talked about and in many instances is actively censored. Neither of the US political oligarchs (republicrats/demicans) wants to actually deal with the problem and actively exacerbate it with idiocy like being pro-welfare expansion, pro-life, and pro-war. It is similar in other parts of the world as well.

There are many things that we could do right now that would help but it would be a massive disruption to the economy and rights of many people. Automated transportation/distribution, filter all coastal runoff water, massive push for entomophagy, finishing the fiber roll out and keeping up with expansion, implement renewable/less hazardous energy sources, upgrading the power grid, make all schools paperless, clean up the mess we've made in the oceans, etc...

Good luck getting people to sacrifice anything to make this happen. Building out the infrastructure would displace thousands of people in areas where land value is quite high. Also, how much push back will there be when you tell people something like, they're no longer allowed to drive their personally owned vehicles on public roads? Replace transportation with an automated system payed for through taxes. Reduces the cost of transportation across the board but people's cars become worthless.

I think that might be humanities biggest hurtle. We don't act in the best interests of our species survival over our individual survival.