[octaonalocto]

I strongly disagree with your comment. Your definition of luxury is narrow and proscriptive. If you're trying to evaluate whether people would accept certain changes in their lifestyle, their definition of luxury is the one that matters.

In a tight definition, indoor plumbing is a luxury. As a person whose family vacations used to include an outhouse, I most certainly do not consider that a luxury in my life.

[jacquesm]

No, my definition of luxury is to take anything that we didn't have in the last 100 years and consider it optional, because that's the kind of world you'll be living in regardless of your opinion on the matter.

And then you will realize that it is a luxury to be able to zoom around the planet on a moments notice, to have a multiple 100's of KW personal energy budget per month and so on. These things are not givens and once they're gone everything that depended on them will be gone as well, because you will prefer to survive.

[octaonalocto]

100 years in an arbitrary period. Why not go back 10k years to define a luxury?

[emn13]

The whole scenario is far fetched. We're imagining some egalitarian world (won't happen), in which with today's technology we need to make due with tomorrows resources, but without time to adapt and find alternatives.

More realistically, we need to start making at least some steps. If air travel becomes more expensive, we'll do less of it, and at least try to find alternatives, personally. Society might try to find workarounds, like negative emissions, or construct alternatives (like high-speed rail) that are "good enough", at least for many flights. We might have alternative, emissions free fuel, someday.

But the real point is: this is not going to be as extreme as is sketched simply because inequality isn't going away, and secondly - this is necessarily going to happen gradually, so the impact will be reduced as society will have time to adapt. Let's just hope gradually doesn't mean glacially, because then we'll pay the climate price.

[lisper]

> this is necessarily going to happen gradually

That depends on what you mean by "gradually". Climate is a non-linear system. It can change radically in a very small number of years. Within a single generation, for example, much of the world's current farmland could become desert. That is going to be very hard to adapt to.

[jacquesm]

> That is going to be very hard to adapt to.

If that comes to pass I hope I won't be alive to see it, but I think 'hard to adapt to' is putting it very mildly. You're talking about war and famine on a scale that the world has not seen before.

[lisper]

Yes. That's exactly right. I think even the people who worry about climate change don't fully appreciate how grim the situation is, and how fast things are going to get really, really bad, a small number of decades tops. If you haven't already, look up "blue ocean event."

[rixed]

What people would accept or not it's speculation.

People in the west were not supposed to accept a lockdown, yet they did. They were not supposed to accept election fraud, corruption, high crime rate, yet they regularly do as well.

Acceptance is really not the hard part in this problem.

Being organized in such a way that the global long term interest of the majority is only a concern when it can be positively correlated to the short term interest of a minority, is.