The correct answer is neither; we need advanced technologies and material wealth that will allow us to master the environment more robustly. Consider that in the past 50 years of climate change, the human population more than doubled yet the number of deaths from climate-related causes dropped to one-third[0], mainly due to the growing wealth of developing countries that allowed them to better shield themselves against extreme weather conditions.
The state of man in nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Anyone who has spent any time outdoors in remote places or tried to build even a rudimentary shelter knows how true that is. There has never been a time when the climate was conducive to human flourishing except when humans made it that way by ever-increasing per capita energy expenditures; hence today, despite everything, we are the most insulated from the effects of climate on ourselves.
To "stop" climate change is like telling Glurg the caveman no, you cannot light that stick on fire to keep yourself warm, because think of the CO2 emissions!
So… you know. No free lunch.
Hope we, as biological creatures borne of a billion-year old evolutionary process, don’t actually need the system that birthed us (for some reason).
I'm by no means advocating that we destroy nature for the fun of it! But if the alternative is between us destroying nature or nature destroying us, I know which side I'm going to pick.
We build such systems all the time and they do appear to be stable. The modern world couldn’t exist without their success.
“Being greedy” is having food on the table, a roof over my head, and a few nice things?
Food on the table — Rice, lentils, peas: not greedy; Beef burgers, caviar, civet coffee: kinda is.
Roof over your head — traditional hut, not greedy; penthouse suite in Dubai, greedy.
A few nice things? So many options. Once was, aluminium and purple(!) both cost more than gold. Is it "a nice thing" or "greedy" for me to fly to some paradise island for a week vacation? Or to own a fursuit? Or a normal suit? Or to get an electric bike instead of a manual one?
(I'm in favour of raising everyone to the level of current royalty; I think this can be done without wrecking everything, but we have to solve some problems first).
What percentage of people do what you’re describing?
The most straight forward way to do this would be to make doing the bad things more expensive, which means taxing carbon emissions.
Alongside this would be to create alternatives that are cheaper and easier to use.
Unfortunately this would mean actually spending money, making investments in public works, and changing things away from the status quo, and apparently this is impossible.
So we're going to sleep walk into our doom rather than do basic things like making gas more expensive and building public transit.
Yes. This is the solution starting in 1990. It is too late now, for this to be the solution. It is a good idea, but.
We are going to have to shut down hole industries, and the owners will loose their investment. We are going to have to make a lot of very rich people, ordinarily rich.
This is very hard to do in a democracy.
To drive emissions down to zero, without massive economic disruption, start small and increase the tax gradually every year.
Coupled with a "border adjustment" (a tariff on goods coming from countries to compensate if they have less aggressive climate policies) you can solve the problem of industries being outsourced to countries where GHG pollution is cheaper, and simultaneously put pressure on those countries to implement similar policies.