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> or simply think it’s not a viable solution to stop the economy, or not treat sick people with grid-taxing medical equipment, or deny automobiles to people who must commute to earn a living, or ban certain foods, and so on and so on.

At least in the US, pretty much nobody of any consequence is advocating for any of those things.

> How can we live how we want to live, whatever that means individually, in a way that is sustainable and avoids a system of state rationing?

It's an extremely complex problem, but for the most part what we need to do is understood. Stop burning fuel for energy by implementing renewables and nuclear, and retiring coal and NG; and switch to electric cars, trucks, and trains. Those two things alone would almost eliminate half of US carbon emissions. There's a long tail of much more difficult problems to tackle after that, but accomplishing just those two would buy a ton of time to address that long tail. That's why everyone serious is focusing on those two problems and not like, artificial meat or whatever.

How do the people who dont deny the risk and dont want to damage the economy propose to handle this situation? Not changing things fast enough just kicks the can down the road to the younger and future generations.

Even for the middle-aged, climate damage might really make their retirement vastly different from todays pensioner life. If insurance is exorbitantly expensive (due to massive pay-outs year-after-year), safe place to live are scarce and expensive (due to neglection to build housing in safe areas for decades), then a lot of money has to be spend on basics. Property prices (and insurance) have a massive impact on any base-level pricing of everything, but mostly essentials: shelter and food.

Its even worse for the younger generation who will struggle to build up wealth, when growth is impossible due to regular wipe-outs of massive amount of wealth due to disasters, not to speak of wars triggered by mass migrations out of places that are untenable to live.

I don't think we can live the way we want to live without extreme weather, disease, and/or famine killing a good share of us. The modern human way of life is simply unsustainable.

The problem is that no one wants to willingly sacrifice their own wants or needs for the greater good, which makes sense. Why should I suffer for 8 billion people I don't know? The scale is just too large to comprehend as a basic human.

We need to focus on fixing our local area and living as much within what it can provide as we can. It's easier to understand. It's easier to see the impacts.

But it doesn't solve the problem of human caused climate change.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I don't see a way out of this that ends with anything but the complete and utter collapse of civilization as we know it before 2100.

I believe that we will no longer possess the technology to access this comment well before that time, and we'll see a return to feudal/tribal lifestyles with a much diminished population.

I just hope it happens after my bloodline has already died out, and none of my kids or grandkids will have to experience the shit show. But I have little faith of that. I think the collapse will come within my kids' lifetime, and that's very depressing.

> The modern human way of life is simply unsustainable.

It doesn't have to be that way, it's just that our owners chose it so they can live in opulence 'til the end.

As much as I do genuinely blame the wealthy elite for most things. . . My way of life is unsustainable. Yours is too if you live in a Western country, and most Eastern countries at this point as well.

I get what you're saying, but I believe it's technically a solvable problem -- the issue is how things are structured economically/politically.

If we had cheap and abundant carbon-free energy that would address the key driver of climate change. If only there were cheap and abundant carbon-free sources of energy...

> We need to focus on fixing our local area

And many people take that as building walls and aggressively rounding up anyone who tries to sleep in a park.

We are already suffering today. The housing crisis is connected to our car oriented lifestyle and unsafe street.

It's not about sacrificing for the future, it's about seeing a better way to live our life.

"suffer" in this context is using some form of renewable energy and curtailing the industries that pump the 95% of all CO2 into the air. The absolute horror.

You say this, but if you think that is suffering, wait until clean water is a limited resource. You aren't going to be running away to Mars. We can't even fix the very simple issues on Earth.

Suffer, in this context, is living a life that is completely different than the very convenient one we're used to. Not just renewable based.

The technology just isn't there, and I don't think it will be there by the time we need it.

Clean water is already a limited, and fought over resource. The water wars in the US will start in either Colorado or Texas within 50 years. I'm calling it now. There will be actual violence.

What tech isn't there? It's been there for decades at this point. Unless you mean delusional ideas like pumping even more waste into the air in hopes that we can magically pull it out. Yes, that's always been a lie, and will always be untenable. The reality is that the US has no intention of moving away from oil and thats purely due to financial incentive and existing power structures being intertwined with oil barons

Storage and grid resiliency is what I'm talking about. Renewables just aren't there yet. I genuinely wish they were and dream about an alternate timeline where electric cars weren't killed in the crib.

I think the issue is that while there is no social policy wide drive to fix anything, anything you do as an individual is a drop in the ocean. Of course you should take reasonable steps, but needing to commute can be fixed with reliable high speed rail and buses etc. Unfortunately, there will need to be incentives towards particular outcomes and rationing if that fails. This is a huge existential problem. I don't blame individuals for isolated actions, but I do blame them if they resist political and economic solutions.

The problems we have are primarily problems of production. If production is adjusted, consumption will adapt if it is managed well.

I'm not sure fixing the challenges and moralizing are orthogonal. We need people, across the political (and any other) spectrum, to recognize the contradictions in their lives in the hopes it affects change.

i like to point to the God believers (who are usually not believers in human caused climate change) that the increasing flood/hurricanes/heatwaves/draughts/etc. (and with the red states being hit particularly hard at that) is a God's message that their current ways are wrong, and so they should listen to the God if they don't want to listen to the scientists.

I'm sorry but this is so misguided. You could magically take every gas powered vehicle off of the road immediately, and you would only remove like 3% of the problem. The idea that you can "consumer activism" your way out of a industrial production problem is a malicious lie propagated by Neo-Liberals who directly benefit from those industries.