What evidence do you have that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would require significant reductions to ease of life and comfort for the average citizen of this world?
Here's a counter-example: reducing coal emissions in Beijing would significantly improve the ability of the populace to breathe.
Well it would reduce it quite a bit. However it would not do a single thing about the vehicle emissions.
Then, if they reduced the coal emissions they would have to replace that massive baseload power with something else. Let's face it, coal is cheap, available, has abundant resources which are easy to extract and a Coal power station can go up in 6 months.
The only truly viable alternative, today, which does not emit CO2, nuclear, is truly expensive, is powered by a very constrained resource which is hard to extract and takes at least 5 years to build if it's really going to last and be safe.
So if you believe that going without coal is going to a quick one stop shop in terms of air quality, think again. Then add to that the exponential growth in vehicles, many of which are diesel and you realise that air quality is not going to be quite to easy to get.
Also that power is as much for manufacturing as it is for personal consumption. Which means jobs, wealth, goods, freedom.
Now let's look at the UK which I did an analysis of recently for some friends I talk to elsewhere.
So we shift the personal vehicle traffic to EV. Great. The energy use balance of the UK is...
Around 12% Electricity
Around 38% petroleum of which 27% was personal transport
So if we wanted to go EV in the UK totally, we would need to triple our current electricity capacity. But our spare capacity is only 5% in winter. Worse is that we will be closing down 7gwh of coal fired plants in the next 5 years and we'll be replacing that with 7.5gwh of Nuclear. Which, if all goes well with the Government contract, should be ready in about a decade. If it goes like most other government stuff it'll take 2.
So, in order to reduce our emissions, meet our targets, around the world, we're either going to have to make whole new businesses to make the transition or we're gong to have to massively wind back our lifestyle to reduce our carbon footprint.
Creating whole new businesses will require epic level government funding which will require epic level taxes.
We have started too late and too little. Far too few people even care about what is going on and even fewer of them want to make the sacrifices. Trust me I talk to people about this a LOT. The level of ignorance fostered by the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), pushed out by the right wing press and the denialoshpere is huge.
I don't need to produce surveys to prove my point, I just need to read the press, talk to people and, above all, watch how they vote.
Meanwhile the cryosphere shrinks and idiots like the Daily Mail and WUWT talk about "recovery"....