You may not think raising gas prices is the sort of force that might incur damage, but making life more difficult and expensive is inherently costly, and those costs are real -- settling for jobs that are poor fits, education that is missed, businesses that fail, needed care that becomes economically impractical, opportunities missed due to expenses. A sacrifice that means little to you may be tragic in someone else's life.
I do not think that at all. There will be lots of damage. That is the whole point, we cannot effectively reduce energy consumption without reducing consumption which is moving less mass less distances.
Either less humans period fly to Tahiti for honeymoons, or more humans live a much lower quality of life (what is considered quality of life today).
Hence the political intractability of the problem.
I never understood why people believe living in dense cities is good for the environment. Could you explain why you think so? I get the transit argument, but imho everything else points to the opposite. Cities are warmer than rural areas. They cannot store the water from rain, they have to transport it away. They have problems with air pollution, not only because of cars. They disconnect people with nature, because they cannot experience nature day to day. The air is much better outside of cities. You can't buy healthy food around the corner from the farmer that produced it, etc.
We can and have designed cities that properly handle rainfall. The issue is not density, but the lack of water-permeable surfaces. Suburban parking lots and wide freeways cause the same issues and on a larger scale due to the low density.
The lack of nature is, again, solved not just once. In Amsterdam they have dense urban areas right next to actual farms with cows, free-range ones. Again, you save space for nature by going high density. Compared to sprawling out with cul-de-sacs a you have more people getting closer to nature more often. Same argument for farmers traveling to town.
(I do sense a bit of mismatch between conceptions of non-dense-city living spaces. You seem to be talking about something that combines the environment of rural areas with the convenience of suburbia, but these two seldom co-exist without wasting a lot of tax money on maintenance…)
After seeing how pandemics work in densely populated areas, nope. Never. That has ship has sailed.
Or the miraculous discovery of an energy / locomotion mechanism that does not have the negative side effects of current known sources.
Anyway we may have left ourselves little choice. I certainly don't think we're still within the window of "this is worse for everyone but better for me" being acceptable.
The reduction in quality of life would be inevitable, hence the political unviability.
The solution has always been to make gas $20 per gallon or $30 per gallon or whatever it needs to be to force people to use dense housing and public transit or cycling/walking.
Problem is not all the countries are going to do it, especially the ones who have not been living the high life for the past 60 years, so it is politically dead in the water. And hence you end up with exaggerated promises and delusional pop science, stuff that is politically palatable.