You're absolutely right and it does take time. Unfortunately, when dealing with macro-level issues like this, putting in place long-term incentives and disincentives in the form of fines/taxes/etc. has been shown to work far better than just encouraging people to 'do the right thing.'

You can increase prices slowly, or announce that you will increases prices in fife years. I find it quite unlikely that people's life will collapse when you increase energy prices by five percent a year or so.

Please try and live in a developing country. 5% is huge for a family that can't make ends meet. I don't want to generalize but utopian ideas seem to be propped up on HN without counting billions of other people and their circumstances.

Luckily we can get 80% of the way to our carbon goals by completely ignoring developing countries and fixing things in the rich countries.

Historically, many more seem to lose their lives in directed economies.

No one is proposing central planning here. Just normal methods of nudging the market out of destructive behaviours.