The masses are, of course, a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different things going on in their reality.
Some of them DO have the financial wherewithal to care about more than cost, but choose to only make their decisions based on their personal cost, and the rest of the cost to the planet is known but irrelevant to them. I'd be willing to put these folks into the stupid category.
And there are people who know about the costs to the rest of the planet, and don't have the wherewithal to make their decision on any other factor than cost - their only real alternative is to commit suicide so they stop contributing to the problem. Of course, they don't choose to do that. These folks aren't stupid - they're desperate just to get by. They're also not ignorant - they'd do something different if survival wasn't an all consuming imperative in their lives.
Some are people who have the financial choices and they don't understand the external cost - they really do think the money out of pocket is the sum of the cost involved in the choice. These people aren't stupid - they're ignorant, and ignorant can be educated and improved. My own sense of things is that ignorance on this topic is fading broadly speaking. Extreme weather will, I think, be our ally on this front
And most people are somewhere on a continuum within these extremes. Not malicious, not stupid, not out to destroy the world and feather their nest along the way.
The point of course is that the masses aren't, really, and that there's a whole range of nuance within a very big range of attitudes and approaches. Somebody else pointed out elsewhere that while its easy to be impatient at the rate of adoption of EV's and conversion to renewable energy sources, the reality is that this is happening at a shockingly fast pace. The term "EV" wasn't in general use 10 years ago - today it is. At least in the US, coal powered electric generation plants are being taken offline at an amazing pace - the article somebody linked elsewhere on the site, if I remember right, indicated something like 1/3rd of that fleet decommissioned over the last 10 years. And the kinds of rationale and approach to helping shut those plants down that makes it easy for me to imagine coal powered electricity will be gone from the US in 10 or 15 years (not a fact - a guess made by me and from what I got from the reading).
Something we can all do to help with the transition to electric transport - volunteer some time when you can and attend an EV event. Show off your car and talk to people about EV's. Heck - we're all doing that already as we're driving around doing errands
I figured out for myself - what I am there to accomplish when I do something like that, is to help people make the mental transition from "EV's are something other people drive, but don't work for me" to "Maybe I can see myself in an EV" (any EV!).