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.