Apparently the writers had good intentions for this episode, but watching it back it seems to play into all the worst ideas around climate change. Like, every single one.
It might be controversial to do this, but the only way I feel able to reason about this episode is to take for granted the truth of Trek-branded-climate-change (TBCC) in-universe – while the theory about warp speed damage may have been false, it was crafted in a writers' room as a response to the (again very real) climate change in our universe. The episode isn't about whether the theory's true; it's interested in what we do given that it is.
The Hekaran planet would be one of the first to suffer from the effects of TBCC, but we never really see it, and we haven't seen this planet before and won't see it again, so we end up with this idea that the climate change, even if it's happening, is happening "over there", and so the rest of us needn't worry. The Hekarans' concerns were being ignored by the Federation, and given the above we're led to believe they were right to ignore those concerns.
Serova and Rabal are the mouthpieces for the people, and here we finally get some interesting storytelling – turns out the two of them have been doing some direct action. The good kind of direct action too – not just raising awareness about a serious problem, but raising awareness by taking out high-warp-capable ships, which actively mitigates the damage their engines would cause. This is some good shit, and our resident bitch Riker responds by yelling that the "activists" have no right to do direct action to save the lives of millions. If our heroes dislike the idea, your barely conscious viewer at home isn't going to sympathise too heavily with direct action, which is a shame because it's some good shit.
With two Hekarans around, we're able to explore two different mindsets in climate action. Serova (the one worth a damn) holds her knowledge and power as ransom in order to be heard. Rabal (wet af) plays respectability politics by rolling over. Our heroes respond positively to Rabal for this reason – playing into the idea that it's necessary to be civil if you want to improve anything. When Serova and LaForge have a tiff, she's bang on again: LaForge tries some pointless whataboutism and outright ignorance and she calls him out. She decides he isn't going to listen and ends the conversation, and she's right to do so. When Picard decides the solution is the Federation Science Council – an option already rejected by Serova – she again leaves, while Rabal (soggy mess) continues his bootlicking nonsense.
Serova continues the direct action and successfully proves her theory – but not without taking her life in the process. This, again, irks me a bit: so much media seems unable to properly present the concept of direct action without some underlying implication that it's a slippery slope towards martyrdom. Even if the episode wished to explore the concept, having a character declare "I'm sorry" before exploding in a brilliant corona of light romanticises a concept that really ought not to be romanticised.
Rabal (soaking, dripping wet) declares "Serova wasn't willing to wait" after she's died, which, yikes, but also plays into the idea that a bit more time and a bit more research is the way forward, and that Serova's impatience is ultimately useless. This is a frustratingly pervasive idea today - climate change movements are sometimes rejected on the grounds of timing rather than argument. Why do today what you can put off 'til tomorrow, Squidward asks.
Serova's actions also fall a bit short of what would be a genuinely meaningful and astute story beat – she contends that the correctness of the theory will be enough to kickstart some action, and she dies believing that. This may have been a sensible thought in the 90s (not really), but 30 years later we know how painfully optimistic that is, and it's wrong for the episode to frame this as a simple "oh, sorry, we didn't know, we couldn't've known" kind of issue. Of course, Picard and his system can do no wrong, so the knowledge is all they need to suddenly implement meaningful change. This has a real "contact your representatives" vibe to it, a very-much-dead strategy for effecting change.
The final humiliation for 'Force of Nature' is its ultimate irrelevance – the warp speed limitation to stop the TBCC is mentioned in a couple of later TNG episodes (mainly to explain that they've chosen to ignore it) and then never again. DS9 and VOY never touch it. If we're going to maintain a canon, what do we assume? Presumably some tech came along that solved everything. What would a viewer take away from that besides the idea that no one needs to do anything if technology will soon save the day? We needn't ask whether the tech actually exists, or how much it cost (materials- or labour-wise), or whether it was really a good idea to focus on persisting the current way of doing things instead of finding new ways to do things.
We also get a sense of the real limitation of the Trek universe for telling stories explicitly about climate change. With space travel so cheap, the entire galaxy is basically modelled as a big island with multiple states/governments, and the individual planets are the towns and cities, and the ships are the cars and cruise ships that people use to get between the towns. In this framing, your TBCC must either be localised to a city (in which case you just abandon the city since cars/ships are cheap) or it's galaxy-wide, and thus your climate change issue is a transport issue; the only story you can tell is one where travelling between cities is bad now and so we should do less of it. In the real world, you have alternatives to cars and cruise ships, and those alternatives are better than cars and cruise ships, but Trek would have you believe that climate change action is all about making things worse for everyone.
I don't know what a "good" climate change story in the Trek universe would be like. I imagine it would have to dive several layers deeper into metaphor, or go back in time again. Neither of those options is super appealing, and I kinda like the ballsiness of the decision to go for it in the present day of the 2370s. That said, it failed spectacularly. There was a cat in the B story though, and lots of people like cats, so maybe it's not all bad.