Europe doesn't have food insecurity. Health is pretty good and there's a safety net. Even China scores pretty well on those points. Yet their per capita emissions are much lower than the US.
You also should be aware about the amount of coal power plants it runs and keeps building (https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-takes-the-brakes-off-coal...).
It is a good time to ask ourselves which country contributes the most to emissions and crucial to avoid any mental gymnastics while at that. But unfortunately yes if you dramatically reduce coal usage in China people will die.
But I suspect it's still probably better than China where many people are simply not counted in stats (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990197/ etc). These are also people with least or no access to healthcare and education btw, so we can only guess if life expectancy on paper is better than in reality...
Perhaps air travel is cheaper. But wages are lower meaning people need to work more hours before they can take a flight.
Nothing prevents climate change unless we get more intentional and scaled investments in renewable energy and circular green economies.
You could go the Soviet route (had 30 cars per 1,000 people, a lot of train, bus and subway), but do you really want that? Of course, you would want to improve it because Soviet economy was hugely wasteful despite all this. Plus, all the apartment blocks are not going to build themselves, and certainly not without carbon emissions.
We need a 1000s of bullets fired at changes to avoid even higher costs of climate change on our current path.