Simply untrue. Solar panels are cheap. We do some unsustainable things, for sure, but the idea that everyone has a choice between killing the Earth or living in medieval times and hoeing the mud like some Monty Python peasant is just the rankest sort of bullshit.

We do unsustainable things largely because the monetary incentives are to do so. We could easily have advanced, sustainable lifestyles.

Yes, there are some low hanging fruits. My country (USA) is the worst offender. But if you do the math, we can't afford to consume the same amounts we do now with fully sustainable tech. Not yet. I didn't mean to imply we have to swing cats into creeks and dig in the mud with sticks. But we will have to do things like pay more for meat, imported goods, electricity, and gasoline. We still can have them, but they would be more expensive, sometimes a lot more (such as airline travel). There's no way around this. We could have the rich subsidize the cost of these things for the poorer, but regardless, emissions-producing goods will need to be consumed less for emissions to decrease. How could it be any other way?

Emissions from the creation a given good/service can be reduced in 2 ways:

1. Reducing the consumption of said good.

2. Making the good sustainable.

Case 1 means either rationing a good or raising its price. Case 2 means raising the cost of production. In both cases, it costs more to consume the same amount.

True but your average joe has far less control over that infrastructure than the corporations profiting from it. When you have to drive to get to work because oil companies leverage their power to make public rail impossible, are you really making a choice to consume that product? I resent the idea that average people just getting by are expected to upend their life, while to expect a corporation to moderate their behavior is apparently absurd.

I do think it's absurd to expect them to moderate their behavior without regulation. If it made their products more expensive to do so (which it would), they'll just lose market share to some other less scrupulous corporation selling the same thing for cheaper.

A corporation's literal only job is to seek profits above all else. In the US, that's a legal requirement (Edit: I was very wrong about this). That doesn't make a corporation some subversive evil entity, more like an algorithm that finds solutions optimized for one variable. They do what they do because it's what makes them the most money. And remember, they have to operate this way (Edit: I was wrong about legal requirements on this).

So we can change the problem space by making it more expensive to behave in certain ways. Aka, regulation/emissions taxes.

> A corporation's literal only job is to seek profits above all else.

That isn't even approximately true as a blanket statement (labor unions and political parties in the US are, in fact, usually corporations), and, a perusal of actual corporate charters will show that it's not literally true even in specific cases.

> In the US, that's a legal requirement... people face fines or worse if they don't.

No, it's not, though that's a popular myth around the fiduciary dutied of corporate officers. [0]

[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi...

> In the US, that's a legal requirement... people face fines or worse if they don't.

Please don’t spread misinformation. That’s not what fiduciary duty actually means. There are plenty of corporations that fund charity efforts without their execs landing in jail. “Profit above all else” is not enshrined in law.

> more like an algorithm that finds solutions optimized for one variable.

Right, exactly, which is why I took issue with capitalism in my original post. Companies are acting completely rationally under our current economic system, and it's literally destroying the ground from under our feet.