Perhaps instead of using one of the hallucination machines that's aggravating the climate crisis, you could have done some research: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-worlds-top-1-of-emitter...

> Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%.

The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires, it's true. But you are also assuming that reducing emissions must come with a reduction in lifestyle, which is untrue. Think about the way that our computers are designed to be disposable and unrepairable, or how clothing is made worse and worse (because it's more profitable, which is only necessary because of the need for infinite growth). Or, as you pointed out, North Americans use a ton of energy for terrible reasons, and fixing that problem would improve their quality of life: walkability, bikability, and public transit so people can drive less (or even stop owning a car) while also getting improved health; replacing flights with more comfortable high speed trains; removing the need to maintain a lawn for every house (shockingly terrible for the environment); etc. Or how we ship things all around the world to be assembled in different phases in different countries because it's cheaper (and suppresses labour). What so many of the things we need to do to solve this problem have in common isn't a reduction in lifestyle (some will do the opposite!), but rather that they impact profits and therefore threaten infinite growth.

Yes, there are some things that people won't like doing, like significantly reducing the amount of meat they eat (>15% of global emissions are from meat production, and it is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon). But pretending nothing will ever change doesn't solve the problem (and we'll be catastrophically forced to change later if we don't voluntarily do it sooner).

I'm not saying nothing will ever change. That's a misreading. I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.

Environmentalists have been making the "abstinence first" guilt trip argument for decades and it's done absolutely nothing and it will never do anything. That approach is a total failure. I use the abstinence framing because it's like abstinence-based sex ed. Instead of having sex, teenagers have guilty sex.

Let's say Claude's wrong. The argument still stands if it's off by 10X. Soaking the rich won't help by more than a rounding error, and redistribution might actually increase resource use. It's also a one-time thing.

Speaking of AI: turning off all the AI data centers won't help either. They're a few percent of electricity use. A few percent won't matter and it's another one-time thing. It's not an ongoing solution to anything if the economy is still powered by burning stuff.

Then you have the developing world. Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.

There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.

If Africa modernizes on coal like China did, that'll add another China worth of emissions, which would be catastrophic. The only way out is for Africa to industrialize and modernize on sources of power that don't emit CO2.

Luckily that's possible, but telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen. It's how you get them to say "fuck you" and ignore you.