Overall, this is a good thing - I certainly don't want to go back to superstition, subsistence farming, and dying of infectious diseases at 50.

But it's a good principle to be aware of: economic incentives often make it impossible to intentionally lose a technology once it's developed.

I would love to go back to a time in which I could safely walk my small town's streets without 3-ton steel boxes noisily charging through at speeds far faster than a horse could gallop. But we've developed the technology to build 300 horsepower mobile living rooms that the average person can buy (for a staggering quantity of debt) and we've decided to allow them everywhere. In addition to the greenhouse emissions and costs and noise pollution, they're the leading cause of death for people from ages 5 to 22, and the second most common cause from ages 23 to 67. But the staggering utility means we're not putting those back in Pandora's box.

Air conditioning, likewise, is incredibly comfortable and a massive boon for health and productivity in the hotter regions of the world - not to mention the incredible nutrition benefits of freezing or refrigerating food - but in a vicious cycle, you have to use energy that makes the world hotter to make your tiny part of the world cooler. Personally, I'll go without until June, leave the thermostat high during the summer, and turn it off come September. But a shop can generate traffic and an employer can generate productivity by spending a little more on energy costs. The genie offered us the vapor compression refrigeration cycle, and that will never be put back in the bottle by a selfish society.

Have you seen pictures of Amsterdam from the 60's? The Dutch were going gung-ho for cars, but they stopped and modernized their infrastructure instead.

https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...

Cars have some benefits, but they're not such an impossibly high utility that they can't be deprioritized. It's a policy choice.

> but in a vicious cycle, you have to use energy that makes the world hotter to make your tiny part of the world cooler.

New construction with moderate insulation and an efficient heat pump cooling system will have relatively small cooling costs. Include some rooftop solar in the build and it’s negligible or even zero marginal cost to run the cooling unit.

>Overall, this is a good thing - I certainly don't want to go back to superstition, subsistence farming, and dying of infectious diseases at 50.

A nitpick but people weren't dying at 50; they were dying as infants. The average life expectancy was around 50 because so many children died, but the life expectancy of people who made it past age 5 was around 60-70: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/ .