And still, a politician who says that airplane ticket and meat prices should rise to levels unaffordable by the bottom 95% won't get elected. It's too unpopular. Despite quite many people in non-western countries not flying in airplanes and only eating meat on rare occasions.

None of those are distant benefits.

The person who dies for “ideals” are mostly driven by false claims[0] about the nature of the afterlife.

Improving your child’s outcomes is a biologically preset desire.

Saving for retirement is still ultimately in one’s immediate self interest.

Producing theoretical research has the immediate benefit of recognition in their fields and the possibility of a “lottery win” outcome.

Saving for retirement is

> they die for ideals

Sometimes. This is not something generally expected of people, and newsworthy when it happens. Not all ideals are also selfless - some, like loyalty to one's God in expectation of an afterlife, is directly selfish.

> work their whole lives to give their children a better future

A combination of biological imperative and social pressure older than civilization; also pretty selfish.

> save for retirement

Most people can't really do that, especially not when living paycheck-to-paycheck. That's why retirement funds tend to be done in opt-out and usually socialized fashion.

> produce research on subjects that will only achieve tangible outcomes in the distant future

Even ignoring the status seekers, pure intellectual curiosity gives short-term emotional rewards. I doubt most researchers would be able to sustain their efforts if they didn't feel at least some immediate intellectual reward that outweighed their lowered (or sometimes non-existent) salaries.

My point isn't that individuals aren't capable of putting long-term benefits in front of their short-term interests. My point is that they aren't capable of doing it at scale, in a coordinated fashion. A lot of this boils down to coordination problems - when personal sacrifice has low marginal utility (i.e. you need to get a lot of people on-board to materialize the benefits) and high immediate cost, few people will choose the sacrifice, and even if a small group coordinates on this, the first person to defect will destroy it all.

Personally, I don't think individuals can learn this. To me, it seems that human psychology is essentially fixed. The changes need to be cultural - you need human civilization to learn this. But culture, I believe, is mostly a function of techno-economical landscape, with some small flavouring added from path dependence (i.e. history). Think of culture as water flowing into and settling in a valley, which shape is defined by available technology. It gravitates towards a particular configuration matching the landscape, and you can't make it flow differently by just asking. The way we learn, I believe, is through technologies we develop (possibly also through "social technologies" like forms of governance, though I'm not sure whether those can stand on their own, or are also a function of "hard"-technological landscape).

I think TeMPOraL's point is that if you take away luxuries like airplane flights, cars, meat rich diets from the masses, you will cause massive riots involving human casualties.

Not sure I fully agree with the premise that such measures are needed though. You can also increase efficiencies by e.g. requiring the industry to build more durable products or e.g. increasing spending in artificial meat research as well as high speed trains or hyperloops. People would still eat meat, would still travel the world, but now without causing as much of a carbon footprint.

To offset increased emissions from India and China over the next few decades, we don’t just need “energy efficiency.” We need to go net negative in CO2 output.

Yes. My point is that there's no way of quickly getting to "produce and consume less" without dropping a lot of bodies, so that path isn't helpful.

Carbon tax isn't meant to reduce production & consumption, it's meant to shift it towards things with smaller carbon footprint.

Yes, it's not either-or, but both-and. On its own, consuming and producing less probably isn't enough.

And yet we get another billion people every 15 years.

There is a middle ground, you just can't get there by asking nicely. Humans aren't capable of this level of coordination.

You can reach this middle ground by e.g. building more nuclear plants, introducing emission taxes, subsidizing electric cars to speed up their adoption and other top-down measures that realign the markets with desired social goals.

Pretty much. Life for the average person before the industrial revolution was terrible. It only became decent after the industrial revolution and even that took time. It was built on fossil fuels and consumption.

The only way you can reduce consumption is by increasing efficiency. Limiting people in the long term is not going to work unless you create an authoritarian government.