> If you want to curb consumption you have to price in the externalities. This is true for everything - fast fashion and cheap flights too.

I agree with the idea that a capitalist society should work harder than we do to price in externalities in order to fulfill the social value of a free market.

As a counter example to it being the only way though is how the modern world has drastically reduced and now culturally shuns (although we still have things to fix) human slavery without doing it via economic sanctions or price regulation.

I don't actually have any hope here though - politically in the US I see more of a slide away from free markets and toward techno-feudalism and culturally in the US I see a backslide in empathy and personal values people are willing to make sacrifices for.

You can't regulate people into having particular values (for good or for ill).