It's pretty easily done too. It's just that it's not a very fun thing to do. Like eating vegetables. It's pretty easily done but that doesn't mean everyone does it.
Fossil fuels have - at the same time as the pollution - caused a huge improvement of living standards. A substantial part of the human population tripling in size comes from that, and huge number of people would die if fossil fuels magically disappeared.
There is middleground that saves most of people. We're not doing that because we value our comfort now more than other people's lives later.
And before that we used Whale oil, which we got through a global slaughter of whales and we nearly drove them to extinction. Then it was time to move on.
In many parts of the world, even places you've heard of, people walk or bike everywhere they need to go and spend their free time sitting around chatting with neighbors.
No one's arguing to delete fossil fuels, but it makes sense to minimize usage to freight and public transit.
Do you have a source for that? It didn't sound right and my quick Googling suggests that it's off by around a factor of 20 or more. (Some put datacenters as low as 1% of total electricity consumption, which is a subset of all energy consumption.)
How many megatons of meat do you think Musk eats a month? Does Bezos put a billion burgers into his belly? The vast majority of meat is consumed by people in that bottom 99%. For that matter, how many fast-fashion trendy patterned stockings do you think these men wear? It's really disingenuous to act like you're against luxuries for the 1% and then use meat and cheap clothing as your examples of great evils to be eliminated. Who would be sacrificing if large scale production of these cheap goods were banned? Not the 1%. What you are proposing is not to tear down the 1%, but to suppress the standard of living for the 99%.
Maybe you just chose bad examples by accident though, do you have any proposals that would actually limit emissions from the 1% instead of capping the quality of life for the other 99%?
The very wealthy are able to afford to not go through the same public channels as the rest of us, and so their emissions don't get amortized over vast numbers of users. This is on top of the fact that they can already consume more anyway, which is to say, I have one car, but the very wealthy might collect them (buying new! another thing I've never done), and just the process of manufacturing a new car releases more CO2 than I could produce in several years of driving.
Even if he was your examples are disingenuous. Musk and Bezos aren’t representative of even the richest 1% of Americans.
Get a napkin and sanity check yourself. 1% of 8 billion people is 80 million. There are 330 million people in America. If all of the global 1% are in America and not also in Europe and Asia, which is obvious bullshit, then only 24% of Americans are in that 1% and the remaining 76% are in the lower 99%.
And do you really think only Americans eat meat and wear cheap clothing? Get real.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708114 (Sept 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36792165 (July 2023)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Also the studies I've seen to this effect use a questionable form of attribution when it comes to the "1%". Specifically they include emissions from companies that they invest in.
Therefore, the hard part is changing the structure of society so that people's lives don't suck.
In some cases micro-gassifier rocket heater/stoves (just because you can make one out of mud doesn't mean it's not high technology!) & coppicing and pollarding will make more sense. In other cases clean atomic power and induction heaters/stoves will be the way to go.
Some times willow bark tea, and sometimes morphine.
Maybe the solutions we have on how to cut on emissions is canned.