>The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now.

Have you travelled? This doesn't describe most of the world. Most of the world would need to increase carbon emissions to live the way you're describing.

You aren't describing a zero carbon lifestyle, you're describing a lower carbon lifestyle. And we still use carbon in building the things in your scenario: the building, the car, etc.

Lower carbon lifestyles can slow the speed of the increase in global warming, but as long as we're emitting any carbon we're increasing global energy forcing.

By all means choose lower carbon lifestyles, but fundamentally we need nuclear or renewables + battery or all of the above such that we don't face a tradeoff between energy use and getting stuff people want.

Energy is extremely useful.

> You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.

'political' is true but it covers so many different problems.

For example, while there is a grocery store very accessible to me, you have to plot the route carefully due to the road design.

Then there's the problem of the condo I currently live in not having the infrastructure for charging. (My compromise in that case is a hybrid. Kinda want a plug-in hybrid for my next car, they've gotten to where it very well could handle 80% of my driving.)

> Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?

I've never gotten this lifestyle either... I'm not afraid to do a long road trip once a year or so, but yes in most cases too many costs have been externalized for too long.

> have 2 kids or fewer

This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption".

2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1 This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.

> You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't.

For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?

You're missing the vast interconnected network of stuff that's required to sustain that home. From your home battery to cancer treatments that you might need to sewer that runs to your home, all of this needs to be made and sometimes replaced. Most of those things are still unavailable to most humans; in many places we still haven't built roads, much less sewers and water distribution systems.

Household electricity self-sufficiency obscures the vast requirements to support it and extend this self-sufficiency to billions of other people.

All of the Western nations are at 2 kids or fewer but also so are China and India. Most of the 2+ children come from the ME and subsaharan Africa and areas in Oceania/SEAsia, Maybe some parts of South America. One could slow consumption by not importing people from low carbon footprint into high carbon footprint countries -though many countries, except Japan, aren't comfortable adjusting to lower populations.

Western nations reducing will DO nothing - it is too small a fraction of greenhouse emissions. The large fraction is coming form india and china. And they do not have electric everything. they don't even have running water in most places.

Ressources are not infinite, and most of the consumption doesn't bring much happiness to the consumer, if not the contrary.

A good empirical example is the success of GLP-1 inhibitors, for which people are ready to pay a lot to allow them to consume less food.

Inflation is already here anyway, and 8 billion humans simply can't consume like Americans. Either you anticipate what's coming, or you will have to endure it.

WWII was much easier to sell to the people, because the nazis were invading _now_. It seems impossible to sell reduced standard of living today to respond to a problem tomorrow

The "shill" phenomenon goes much further than ignorant laypeople.

The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century". The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years.

The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.

People are stupid. I almost had a fight with a friend I have seen in a long time, a usually smart person, that wanted to convince me that solar power is more polluting than non-renewable alternatives. He’a not a shill, he is a farmer and like many just believes the propaganda and the skepticism. One of the biggest flaws of human rationality is wanting to believe that ‘the man’ is lying to you and the stupid conspiracy meme on Facebook has a valid point. We all have seen the American public completely implode with the COVID and mask and antivax idiocy.

> The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind.

Is this true? Americans elect leaders who won't even acknowledge the issue is real. We have at times managed to gather some momentum towards using government to address the issues through incentives and regulation - even as recent as the Biden administration - then reactionaries gain power and dismantle the efforts.

The "environmental movement" was not focused on the personal responsibility angle, it's just that the American political system rejected proposals to do any meaningful government interventions because long term thinking is never rewarded.

''Now, the total population of well-off countries in the world is about 1 billion, while China has more than 1.3 billion people. If we are all to become modernized, the well-off population must more than double. If we are to consume as much energy in production and daily lives as the present well-off people do, all the existing resources in the world would be far from enough for us! The old path seems to be a dead end. Where is the new road? It lies in scientific and technological innovation, and in the accelerated transition from factor-driven and investment-driven growth to innovation-driven growth.'' -Xi Jinping, Governance of China

The question is whether you use solar PV or build more coal plants to supply them. The latter makes people sicker, but more dependent on the government, so you can guess which one gets the tax breaks and which one gets tariffs and international politics to make it more expensive to acquire.

Explain your reasoning or stop wasting bits.