Ego and climate change

I was talking with a friend about climate change, and said to this friend, as evidence of the phenomenon and as a segue into something I'd recently been considering, that the winters were getting shorter out west, making the ski season shorter. He quickly said something like, as if it's just an inconvenience for us, which left me a little embarrassed, and which he said with such a low level vitriol that I shut down and our conversation ended. I also could see that he wouldn't want to hear my argument, probably. In actuality, I was trying to say two things about climate change, which I had then felt stifled in saying. One was simple, just that it was occurring and we could see it in these obvious human terms and it was important to see if obvious human terms; the other was something I wanted to talk about, but no longer could talk about it, since the conversation felt shut down, but it was this: shouldn't we be appealing to these wealthy people? I understand that viewing climate change as an inconvenience to wealthy humans is not really crux of the issue...but actually, it might be the crux of the issue. What I mean is this: climate change is caused by human greed, desire, control, all of that. And if we can appeal to the sense that, hey, you wealthy people (probably shouldn't call them this) you are going to lose your ski season, we must stop this fossil fuel stuff that is causing you to lose your skin season. In other words, actually appealing to these people's egos, I think that would get us a lot further than saying like: the planet is more important than any individual or tribe. And while I agree and feel deeply that the latter is true, I believe that appealing to ego - in a somewhat cynical way, perhaps - would end up being more beneficial for the planet. In other words, using the so-called "inconvenience" that climate change causes for certain wealthy participants in the human dramedy and making it clear that they will be losing their coastlines, ski slops, coral reefs, Malibu beach houses, all the beautiful places that they consider their own and that they might feel would be horrible personal losses. Appealing to that ego I think could be helpful, beneficial to the larger world (wealthy lobbyists and such). But I couldn't say that bc the party-line of "as if climate change is just an inconvenience" had been stated.