Europe has tons of cars and air travel that is cheaper and more plentiful than that of US.
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.