You have made peace with these things which is commendable.

That said, you must still understand how big of a change this would be for other people who have not. For example, I suspect the Canadian government would have a hard time telling indigenous populations in Nunavut that they have banned flights to their communities. Same would go for island nations like Iceland or even the state of Hawaii.

You and I can probably both agree that others will be reluctant to give up eating meat, fresh fruits/vegetables that have been flown in from warmer climates. We can probably also agree that most people would not vote for a party that promised to shut down global international tourism.

I cannot see any political solution to this problem.

The options are make some voluntary changes now, or make very chaotic and much bigger forced changes later.

If we make the wrong choice our culture becomes extinct. We may or may not survive as an animal species, but that's almost a secondary issue.

That's it. That's what's on the table. Short of surprise alien intervention or unobtanium Magical Carbon Capture Technology™ there are no other choices.

The political problem is that we've managed to isolate ourselves from both physical and emotional challenges to the extent that we'd rather believe in a variety of fantasy game tokens than deal with reality.

But if that's the best we're capable of as a species, that's where we are. No one is going to give us a special pass. We'll just be one more failed species in a very long list, and that will be that.

If prices rise gradually, people will adapt. Remote villages might become ghost towns (hardly the first time in Canada, incidentally), or become more isolated. And the world isn't going to turn into some utopian egalitarian place either, so the hard reality is that many people won't lose anything by losing air travel, because they already do none, and thus those that have that luxurious habit now will not need to suddenly lose it; there's time to adapt. Most of the US certainly doesn't need air travel either, and train or even road travel can be quite emissions poor; it just means travel will take more time (and willingness to build infrastructure).

A more realistic scenario is one in which inequality does not change significantly - and then the reductions are less severe.

But seriously: losing most air travel (or just cheap air travel): if that's it, count yourself lucky!

I think this is where you and I disagree. I would contend that the average citizen will resist this. I am basing this off what we saw in France when they introduced a very modest fuel tax.

I think this is an issue that would actually unite both the left and the right. I suspect that if we made air travel, meat and fresh (flown-in) produce only available to the wealthiest 0.X% of our population we would see widespread outrage. It would be seen as just another example of inequality.

I expect that even in France those tax hikes will eventually pass, even if it takes longer than elsewhere and much longer than other measures. It may need some other compromise, like a comparable tax-reduction for median incomes; and some level of political maneuvering to placate the particularly hard hit. Or perhaps they'll try to achieve similar reductions via other measures such as speed limits and regulations on cars. But I don't think it's representative of social upheaval vs. climate-change cost in general, anyhow.

It's also known for its remarkably high tax rate on fiul:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#/media/File%3AFuel_...

In a tight definition, indoor plumbing is a luxury. As a person whose family vacations used to include an outhouse, I most certainly do not consider that a luxury in my life.

And then you will realize that it is a luxury to be able to zoom around the planet on a moments notice, to have a multiple 100's of KW personal energy budget per month and so on. These things are not givens and once they're gone everything that depended on them will be gone as well, because you will prefer to survive.

More realistically, we need to start making at least some steps. If air travel becomes more expensive, we'll do less of it, and at least try to find alternatives, personally. Society might try to find workarounds, like negative emissions, or construct alternatives (like high-speed rail) that are "good enough", at least for many flights. We might have alternative, emissions free fuel, someday.

But the real point is: this is not going to be as extreme as is sketched simply because inequality isn't going away, and secondly - this is necessarily going to happen gradually, so the impact will be reduced as society will have time to adapt. Let's just hope gradually doesn't mean glacially, because then we'll pay the climate price.

That depends on what you mean by "gradually". Climate is a non-linear system. It can change radically in a very small number of years. Within a single generation, for example, much of the world's current farmland could become desert. That is going to be very hard to adapt to.

If that comes to pass I hope I won't be alive to see it, but I think 'hard to adapt to' is putting it very mildly. You're talking about war and famine on a scale that the world has not seen before.

People in the west were not supposed to accept a lockdown, yet they did. They were not supposed to accept election fraud, corruption, high crime rate, yet they regularly do as well.

Acceptance is really not the hard part in this problem.

Being organized in such a way that the global long term interest of the majority is only a concern when it can be positively correlated to the short term interest of a minority, is.

When I see these flat assertions stated as foregone conclusions IRL by friends, I am prompted to ask, “What mitigations did you already implement against this conclusion?”

Revealed preferences demonstrate that overwhelmingly their assertions are far stronger than their mitigations. This is worrisome, as it shows even “true believers” are not taking commensurate action. The dislocation when it arrives, if as large a magnitude as claimed by IPCC, will be large even for that cohort.

Interesting. Why are you (or your political affiliates) the ones who get to decide what is a luxury and what is “essential”?

Were you ordained with some divine moral authority?

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but that kind of authoritarian thinking will thankfully never be allowed to prevail in the United States.

> but that kind of authoritarian thinking will thankfully never be allowed to prevail in the United States.

That's a very funny statement.

https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/global-right-wing-auth...