I'm not as negative about this, but with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy why the current initiatives didn't go anywhere.

It's not that people are not willing to make sacrifices. We repeatedly did this in times of famine or war. Europe during WWII is a perfect example. Another good example of a major cultural shift in response to a new threat was the AIDS epidemic. The entire sexual revolution went out the window and we're now in a world where young people have a lot less sex than ever before. We like to talk about gender and sexuality, but we do a lot less with it, so to speak.

Anti-consumption / degrowth arguments face an uphill battle because they basically say "you should live a harder life". There should be less stuff, the stuff should be more expensive, there should be less of you. So you need a good answer why this is the right choice. Doing it "for the planet" doesn't sound too convincing because we're also a part of the planet and most people feel entitled to it. It's hard to get others to make real lifestyle sacrifices because you showed them some photos of koalas or coral reefs.

Because koalas don't cut it, we started giving increasingly apocalyptic, doomsday-type answers, all the way to renaming "climate change" to "climate crisis" or "climate disaster / catastrophe". That was probably a mistake. It created a sense of inevitability (so might as well have fun while you can) and undermined the credibility of the proposed solutions. Is it really going to save us all if I'm sorting my recyclables into five different bins?

So in a sense, I think this is a PR disaster more than anything else.

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