I understand, but when you lead with reduce people hear "rich elitists want me to be poor." They hear that because they have in fact been told that by clueless ideologues for decades.

That's true along the white/blue collar divide in the West and even more so between the developed and developing world. Think Africa is going to listen to the people who used to gather slaves from them and colonize them tell them they can't do what everyone else is doing because we need to save the Earth? The response will be "fuck you, we're poor."

Hell France's vast yellow vest protests were in part triggered by a gasoline tax. Egypt's revolution was in part triggered by rising food prices. Reduce = revolt. This is because anything that increases prices of consumables amounts to a strongly regressive tax. It hits the poor much harder than the rich.

So I get what you mean but I think that whole rhetorical line is actually counterproductive. Focus on replacing fossil fuels. That matters far more than little token reductions anyway. Replace coal with solar and gas cars with EVs and the carbon reduction is large and more importantly persistent.

Personally I like to frame it as progress. Solar could in fact scale much larger than fossil fuels. In the future it could actually provide cheaper more abundant energy.

Passive solar design can improve comfort levels wile dramatically lowering energy use.

No real sacrifice involved -- other than giving up our entrenched mental models that dictate we can either be good or we can have satisfaction, but not both.