The solution hinted at seems to be ditch all technology, transport and modern methods and go back to pre-industrialised society.
How about campaigning for something useful like more efficiency or insulation?
Insulation at the scale needed to avoid climate catastrophe would require a massive international mobilization, along the lines of the Green New Deal and a Green Marshall Plan, to renovate all buildings everywhere before 2050. Sadly the political will to do this seems absent from almost every country, with a couple possible exceptions such as Chile attempting to rewrite their constitution to prioritize climate justice. Basically no countries are approaching even the inadequate Paris agreement targets.
And if you achieved such insulation, without other more drastic changes to our society, people would just run their AC/heat more to reach more luxurious temperatures, and we would not avoid any greenhouse gas emissions.
Therefore we should be working to reduce supply of fossil fuels, to 'keep it in the ground'. If there is less to go round, then efficiencies will still be found but used to maintain what we had (as far as practicable) as opposed to increasing demand
Above a reasonable threshold, personal wealth is arguably theft from the commons anyway.
Someone has to go without to reduce the total consumption. Who is it in your example? And by how much such that the total usage decreases?
But that has an upper limit - there is an ideal temperature. People won't be cooling their houses to 15°C in the summer and heating them to 40°C in the winter.
A lot of people bring this up, but fail to realize that there is a limit to induced demand. For example if you are able to light your house with led bulbs you aren't suddenly going to throw up more lights to light up the neighborhood. There are actual limits to demand and you can exceed them through efficiency gains.
Jevons Paradox is about these societal demands, which influence collective usage of a resource in the opposite direction from individual usage.
Meh, it depends.
Having a light bulb that uses 15W instead of 100W to illuminate a room is certainly a win. There's only so many lights that you'd put in a given area to achieve the same result, even if you add more for aesthetic reasons: there's only so many lumens that are useful in an area.
Furnaces and water heaters are now >90% efficient, and given that they (direct) vent from the outside, and exhaust to the outside increases safety and air leakage. Do you add more heaters and furnaces to a house because each is more efficient.
Cars are more efficient, and yet total annual distance driven (in the US) seems to have plateaued and fallen over the last decade or so:
* https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/12/distance-driven-per...
You'd think that, but we now see people experimenting with light bulbs that are bright as the sun, purportedly to improve their mood: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660718 "I bought an extremely bright “corn cob” style bulb. It emits as much light as about 40 incandescents, and produces enough waste heat that it needs an internal cooling fan to dissipate it." It's not difficult to imagine a future where this is the norm, and people having anything dimmer than full sunlight indoors is considered medieval and backwards. We can always find new limits to what is "useful".
UPDATE: In that article, the author also says this of the lightbulb: "It draws about 2 kWh per day (assuming 8h of usage), which costs about $0.30 at typical rates. This is comparable to one day of a modern fridge or one load of laundry. Power is cheap, folks!" This is a perfect example of why we need to talk about climate justice, because the average American refrigerator consumes more energy than an average person in many countries: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23106061/energy-inequity-...
The rest of the world cannot live the way we currently do in the USA, if we are to avoid catastrophic global heating.
Just because the efficiency increases and we use less energy doesn't mean that the cost will fall. The cost of energy will most likely rise in the upcoming years due to factoring in the co2 emissions.
At least in Europe and in Poland specifically we are preparing right now for a winter of extremely high energy prices and heating prices. Delivering heat pumps and insulating buildings is on top of government agenda right now. And that is in the middle of summer when temperatures are 20-40 deg C outside.
No such much AC specifically, but rather the refrigerant loop generally, IMHO.
Being able to keep humans cool, but also food chilled (to limit bacteria growth), food frozen (for long term storage and transport), as well as medication, vaccines, blood, tissue samples, etc.
The cold chain (in logistics) is a marvel of human accomplishment:
...until we all realize it was short sighted because it killed of billions because of starvation and the inability to cool ourselves.
Revenge Against God For The Crime Of Being.