Exactly my concern. The pandering appeals to us not wanting to change.
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?
That's not what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting we cut the excesses, which there are plenty of. Maybe it's not enough and so we should explore all avenues, for sure.
I often think of the "giant meatball" graphic that visualised all humans on the planet as a giant schmooshed ball sitting in Central Park, New York. To me this is a very powerful visualisation akin to the "pale blue dot" that shows just how few humans are on the planet despite how drastically we are altering it.
I think there are a lot of excesses that we can easily cut. And we should, until we come up with something better that provably will work.
I would like to see our species get off this planet and I hope that we can survive far into the future. I see the first step towards that being us learning how to sustainably live on the planet we have now. It's probably better to scale back our consumption now such that we can have a long time to develop whatever technologies we need instead of going full steam ahead with unsustainable consumption, banking on technological progress bailing us out in some way that we can't possibly count on in a short amount of time.