Public outrage

I remember reading a comic-book in the late 1970s... it made mention of a scary future in which the ozone layer had been damaged and people had to wear protection to go outside. At the time it was pure science-fiction, of course, and I believed that we as a society, would never tolerate that things get so bad as to keep us from going outside whenever we wanted. It just shows what little I knew. Apparently, if a bad situation develops slowly over time and gives us time to accept it, we lose our sense of outrage and focus on the small problems. Which is why we'll be more annoyed by an increase in oil prices than by the fact we keep burning the damn thing at an ever greater pace. Oh, the humanity!