This is near-impossible without killing a lot of people. Humans generally don't just give up their comforts en masse for some distant benefits. This is a fixed property of humans, and the source of most world problems.

Seems to me like humans do lots of things for distant benefits: they die for ideals, work their whole lives to give their children a better future, save for retirement, produce research on subjects that will only achieve tangible outcomes in the distant future, etc

> they die for ideals

Sometimes. This is not something generally expected of people, and newsworthy when it happens. Not all ideals are also selfless - some, like loyalty to one's God in expectation of an afterlife, is directly selfish.

> work their whole lives to give their children a better future

A combination of biological imperative and social pressure older than civilization; also pretty selfish.

> save for retirement

Most people can't really do that, especially not when living paycheck-to-paycheck. That's why retirement funds tend to be done in opt-out and usually socialized fashion.

> produce research on subjects that will only achieve tangible outcomes in the distant future

Even ignoring the status seekers, pure intellectual curiosity gives short-term emotional rewards. I doubt most researchers would be able to sustain their efforts if they didn't feel at least some immediate intellectual reward that outweighed their lowered (or sometimes non-existent) salaries.

My point isn't that individuals aren't capable of putting long-term benefits in front of their short-term interests. My point is that they aren't capable of doing it at scale, in a coordinated fashion. A lot of this boils down to coordination problems - when personal sacrifice has low marginal utility (i.e. you need to get a lot of people on-board to materialize the benefits) and high immediate cost, few people will choose the sacrifice, and even if a small group coordinates on this, the first person to defect will destroy it all.

And still, a politician who says that airplane ticket and meat prices should rise to levels unaffordable by the bottom 95% won't get elected. It's too unpopular. Despite quite many people in non-western countries not flying in airplanes and only eating meat on rare occasions.

None of those are distant benefits.

The person who dies for “ideals” are mostly driven by false claims[0] about the nature of the afterlife.

Improving your child’s outcomes is a biologically preset desire.

Saving for retirement is still ultimately in one’s immediate self interest.

Producing theoretical research has the immediate benefit of recognition in their fields and the possibility of a “lottery win” outcome.

Saving for retirement is

Oops, don't know how I managed to submit that without finishing it. Oh well, I'll throw in my footnote anyway:

[0] More precisely, claims they can't know to be true. (And are also almost certainly false.)

Eh, a sufficiently high carbon tax would probably reduce demand for carbon intensive goods without killing too many people.

Carbon tax isn't meant to reduce production & consumption, it's meant to shift it towards things with smaller carbon footprint.

Isn't the problem that we're already scheduled to be killing a lot of people due to inaction? We need to find a path that maximises the chances for the remaining survivors.

Yes. My point is that there's no way of quickly getting to "produce and consume less" without dropping a lot of bodies, so that path isn't helpful.

Increases in energy efficiency do not cause deaths.

I think TeMPOraL's point is that if you take away luxuries like airplane flights, cars, meat rich diets from the masses, you will cause massive riots involving human casualties.

Not sure I fully agree with the premise that such measures are needed though. You can also increase efficiencies by e.g. requiring the industry to build more durable products or e.g. increasing spending in artificial meat research as well as high speed trains or hyperloops. People would still eat meat, would still travel the world, but now without causing as much of a carbon footprint.

Yeah, my point is either that or genocide; people won't voluntarily cut down on consumption, both because of strong desire to maintain quality of life and because a lot of that consumption actually is life-preserving. Think proper nourishment, sanitation, life-sustaining medicine.

I agree with your proposed alternatives - I was responding to parent's idea that we should "cut consumption and production".

It did drop in the us over the past decade though (for various reasons). I think it is possible, but would require something drastic changing about the way people work/live. If more people worked remotely, better infrastructure for a local lifestyle, etc, etc. The US average is like 12 kW per person, the world average is I think about 3. Surely it is possible without conflict, just requires the magic combination of better and more efficient. I keep thinking recently how it has changed from everyone watching one big tv and fighting over the channel, vs watching whatever you want on your mobile device. It is worse and better at the same time and probably more energy efficient and has become the norm. Makes me wonder what is the equivalent for transport, etc?

The problem is that action to restrict things is taken today and all regular people will get for it are promises of a better future. And some of them are simply empty promises, eg hyperloop.

To offset increased emissions from India and China over the next few decades, we don’t just need “energy efficiency.” We need to go net negative in CO2 output.

I think learning to give up unnecessary comforts is going to be an important part of the development of the human species. If we are every going to mature and learn to be stewards of this earth instead of stripping it for short term gain, we're going to have to change our outlooks.

So I believe mass change must be a necessity no matter how hard it is. If we don't change, we're not going to solve this problem.

Personally, I don't think individuals can learn this. To me, it seems that human psychology is essentially fixed. The changes need to be cultural - you need human civilization to learn this. But culture, I believe, is mostly a function of techno-economical landscape, with some small flavouring added from path dependence (i.e. history). Think of culture as water flowing into and settling in a valley, which shape is defined by available technology. It gravitates towards a particular configuration matching the landscape, and you can't make it flow differently by just asking. The way we learn, I believe, is through technologies we develop (possibly also through "social technologies" like forms of governance, though I'm not sure whether those can stand on their own, or are also a function of "hard"-technological landscape).

Culture is continuously created/reinforced by individuals. Technology has nothing to do with it really. All cultural change starts with individuals who then pass it on to others through their energy & effort, or by raising their children to be like them.

Nah, culture doesn't get far in a fixed technological landscape. People pass on new folk songs and dresses, but you don't get a Reformation without printing press. You don't break out of feudalism without firearms. You don't get a sexual revolution without countless of other technologies and economical transformations that enabled lots of people to live in dense population centers, above sustenance levels and with enough free time. You won't get long-term stewardship of Earth without technologies that enable us to meet our needs without destroying it.

How can technology have nothing to do with culture?

Culture inherently includes technology.

The problem of population growth and higher overall populations in emerging economies adopting more energy intensive lifestyles remains. These economies and their citizens are likely to use an enormous amount of cheap energy to grow their economies: Global energy demand is forecasted to rise by 30% as of 2040[119] because energy demand and thus per capita carbon footprints increase in proportion to income[120], mainly due to increases in China and India.

Policy-makers should reorient their focus to develop policies that contribute to the global public good through cheap, clean energy technology.[123] With access to cheaper clean energy and more energy efficient technology (e.g. smart grids), countries can grow their economies without emitting as much carbon and also help us decarbonize our economies.

citations here: https://lets-fund.org/clean-energy/

It can be argued that people really want things like happiness or security. If they can get this more directly, they can leapfrog some of the materialism. Of course for the ultra poor things like medicine are rational materialism. But there is diminishing rational value for example in dwelling size.

For example there is nothing inherent in status symbols that they need to be environmentally harmful. We can change our values.

Only if we stop producing so many people. (Good luck with that.)

That's been happening almost everywhere for the last half century. Plenty of places are below replacement population growth.

And yet we get another billion people every 15 years.

That is mostly Africa nowadays. The average age there is 19.3.

Not all people are equal in the carbon equation. Per capita consumption mattes.

We can also try to get the people we do produce to consume less…

Yes, it's not either-or, but both-and. On its own, consuming and producing less probably isn't enough.

Yeah, let's go back to the stone age. Problem solved.

After all, there is no middle ground between living in caves and dying of getting gored by a mammoth at the age of 14, and having say, billions of people drive 20 miles a day, as they commute to work, in an opposite direction of other commuters, alone in their three-tonne vehicles powered by dead dinosaurs.

No middle ground whatsoever.

There is a middle ground, you just can't get there by asking nicely. Humans aren't capable of this level of coordination.

You can reach this middle ground by e.g. building more nuclear plants, introducing emission taxes, subsidizing electric cars to speed up their adoption and other top-down measures that realign the markets with desired social goals.

There is actually. The US today has a CO2 emission per capita that's twice the CO2 emission per capita of Germany (not really a good example too). You'd also note that electric cars are also probably not a great solution because their total footprint is still around 15 to 30% of the footprint of a gasoline car (https://www.theicct.org/publications/EV-battery-manufacturin...) and we can't really afford that.

I don't understand what we can't afford. Electric vehicles already have to be charged with carbon neutral electricity to reduce their emissions so it is not exactly a huge leap to expect that the electricity used to manufacture them is also carbon neutral.

Pretty much. Life for the average person before the industrial revolution was terrible. It only became decent after the industrial revolution and even that took time. It was built on fossil fuels and consumption.

The only way you can reduce consumption is by increasing efficiency. Limiting people in the long term is not going to work unless you create an authoritarian government.

>The only way you can reduce consumption is by increasing efficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

My point was that increases in efficiency is the only thing people will accept. Everything else will cause people to not accept it, berceuse their quality of life suffers as a result.