> it's the general public who are entitled to make that choice for their country instead of accepting the decisions of elites/experts and waiting for safety net policies to compensate for the suck.
Nah, people will do as they're told.
Nah, people will do as they're told.
1. This choice gets made in whatever way does get (at least passive) consent of the general public;
2. The leaders try to make a different choice and get promptly replaced in the next elections with whichever populists promise to ignore the elites and roll back these choices;
3. The leaders make a different choice and violently enforce them in an authoritarian manner despite dissent. And IMHO the lifestyle changes required to stop global warming would be sufficiently large to cause meaningful mass dissent if enforced.
I don't see any fourth option - do you?
I hate to bring it as example, but everyone but a minority followed Covid guidelines, locked themselves home, lost their jobs, lived on savings. For the greater good. Those protesting were seen as idiots.
So, yeah, people will do as they're told.
Covid is a relevant example, and IMHO it quite clearly showed the limits of how much people were willing to follow guidelines even in the presence of immediate threat with clear obvious results happening right now. If you would be asking something comparable to Covid restrictions so that in 30 years perhaps the impact would be lower... (the delay in time, the uncertainty of impact...) IMHO Covid experience shows that people simply won't accept that.