This is true, but I fear the time horizons are too long for mass human psychology. WWII was a short term emergency. That seems to be what springs people to action.

Incentives are another way. I still think a global carbon tax agreement would be a good idea: companies work together to implement carbon taxes and cut income taxes or a local equivalent. That helps eliminat the problem of production offshoring to cheaper carbon areas, and gived incentives to alternatives.

Actually making carbon economically unviable with our psychology works, obviously. I really, really hope we can figure out something else cheaper.

Finally, if we had a carbon sequestering method with no major side effects and clear costs, it would be psychologically easier to charge fossil burning industries and activities the cost of the CO2 emitted. Eg a fee of $30 per ton if that's the cost of sequestering. Of course, you'd need a way to measure the carbon impact of the sequestering, to make sure that process wasn't indirectly emitting carbon.

Reducing would also be highly useful, and I hope we will, but enpirically we don't seem to be built for it without some mechanism like what I described above. It's terrifying and dispiriting and I hope we figure out a way to work around our broken mass psychology.

That's not exactly how it works, of course. The people did not lower their quality of life to support the cause, per se, they did it to vanquish Those People. An actual enemy to focus on. And a pretty short timeline. Now you'd ask people to declare war on their own quality of life to fight a consequence which is necessarily vague over a timeline that likely exceeds the remaining lifespan of half of everyone alive today.

Good luck.

In the meantime I sure would like to try some mitigation techniques.

The government of the people, by the people, for the people.

We get what we vote for, for need to vote for backbones.

> Studies on happiness--as hard as that is to objectively study--show it is more closely related to social status than absolute and total consumption.

> In other words, the SUV or sports car apparently has more to do with making people happy by making them look to be of higher social status than the actual utility of those goods.

The first statement doesn't imply the second. Low social status can make someone unhappy, but that doesn't imply that consuming more doesn't make them happy.

In fact, I'm not even sure how much "materialism" is to blame for global warming. I know plenty of people who care more about "experiences" than "material goods" -- and in turn massively contribute to global warming by flying a lot. Equally, I don't view someone as wanting to live in a reasonably sized home in suburbia as necessarily materialistic, even though living there can introduce huge CO2 emissions from driving a lot.

You can cut emissions even more by eliminating the need for cars, but as that would put a huge dent in the automotive-central industrial complex that is the United State, nothing short of apocalyptic conditions are going to make that happen.

For talking about links between wealth and happiness, it matters greatly what absolute level of wealth you are talking about. Within first world countries, the link between between wealth and happiness is weak. But when comparing between countries that are rich versus on the brink of starvation, the correlation is one of the strongest known.

This may seem contradictory makes sense if you think of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you are at the base level of meeting your physiological needs for food and shelter, wealth directly helps you meet those needs and makes them happier. If you can take care of that, the law and order that brings you safety is again correlated with being in a wealthier society. But beyond that, the correlation vanishes because wealth doesn't give you love, esteem or self-actualization.

Yes or they don’t work.

I’ve spent way to much time as lay man trying to penetrate Econ speak to get the issue, but the crux seems to be this:

Currently markets and goods don’t price the cost of economic damage into products.

So plastics are cheap as hell because they don’t reflect clean up costs.

This means we have plastic straws which are so cheap on a per unit basis, that you can sell 100s in a single bundle.

Saran Wrap, packaging plastic, tooth brushes, phones, pens, toothpicks, mugs, wires, buttons, and billions of other items are extremely cheap.

Now imagine if ALL of them went up by a small amount.

Then recall, that for the developing world the difference between a 0.01 cent plastic cost and 0.05, is an increase in packaging cost for cheap goods like single use detergent sachets, or single use shampoo packets.

Of course, this will directly reduce usage of those goods, which is the intended purpose, but the fact is that those goods being cheap means people can grow faster without worrying about the issues which arise.

Carbon curtailment is fundamentally energy consumptive. We will spend more energy to capture carbon. We would have to create a system which is carbon negative in itself (after power and maintenance costs are calculated), and then pay for the whole thing,

Taxing goods to price externalities is probably the most efficient way to achieve it.

Only based on the idea of QoL that comes from economics, where it's measured by money exchanged. That's the less important definition, IMO, just a poor approximation of real QoL.

The global rate of extreme poverty has dropped from 29% 20 years ago to less than 9% today. You need a solid argument for how these actions would reverse the incredible drop in poverty and start us in the other direction, not just the usual factually wrong conventional wisdom.