> Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government.
Unfortunately, the dustbins of history are full of civilizations that took disruptive events carefully and with grave dignity and solemnity and respected the rights of powerful stake-holders within their society.
That the people who make such arguments generally live in the places best positioned to weather out the situation, is also unfortunate. While people in well-pr tut about whether it's really proper for a government to take action to avoid calamity from befalling its citizens, other people will be literally dying.
It's a rather crass and callous/indifferent position you've staked out, you're kind of not coming off like a very good person here. Like it's literally "I guess you'll have to die, then, not like we're going to unwind the economy just for you" once again.
It is, as someone notes upthread, basically the same as masks during COVID. Some people will stroke their chin and pontificate about utilitarianism and the greater good, but that's not really comfort to anyone whose loved one dies from excess pollution or a transmissible disease. And of course the people taking this position are usually the most protected themselves - we all can WFH here if circumstances dictate, it's different if it's your wife stocking a grocery store, they care a lot less about the GDP impact and more about the direct personal impact than you do.
And the existence of this subgroup - such as yourself - fundamentally forestalls the ability of the other 70% of the society from being able to protect itself. Kind of a problem in general - the american system (and the EU and UN as well, but particularly the US) provides too many brakes on action and biases to inaction (via checks-and-balances) such that even supermajority level political control often is not enough unless it is single-party control of every single branch of government and lever of power.
You don't just need 50%, you don't just need 70%, you need 70% across every possible dimensionality that the US distributes political power over - essentially single-party control is the only way to rule if the minority does not consent, and we are talking about people who openly state that they will never consent.
It'll end in deaths sooner or later, whether that's from inaction, or from those whose deaths would be caused by inaction taking action themselves (which is why almost everyone is forecasting conflict and political instability from climate change to kick up majorly in the second half of the century). Again, the only disappointing part is that this too will be visited on the least-fortunate instead of the responsible parties (who will largely be fine, and we will probably even bail out florida and other affected areas anyway).
What happens when the unstoppable force of climate change meets the immovable object of modern political system's bias-to-inaction? Fireworks, basically - because unlike HN you can't just tone-police the discussion away in the real world, people won't just take "I guess you'll have to die so I can have the new xbox this year" lying down.