You don't even have to reduce consumption. You can consume all you'd like. Fuck with modern solar and energy storage tech we could consume /more/ if we'd just stop setting everything on fire for lazy and stupid reasons.

We learned about climate change in the 1980s in school, and I distinctly remember that a whole bunch of new cars around 1986 and 1987 came painted green. I had never seen green cars before during my lifetime as a school aged kid. To me it was a new color for a car. In my childhood brain it was an obvious connection to the perception that gas cars were considered problematic. [ * ]

If I remember correctly the mass media around 1988 was saying that we could only grow carbon for a few more years and then we would have to plateau carbon production on a per annum basis.

[ * ] at around the same time as this was going on, there was a famine in Ethiopia, and I learned that automobiles in north America had been implicated in causing the drought in Africa because they modulated ocean evaporation rates. And that globally cars don't really cause most of the CO2. The system started to seem very complicated and the dynamics were not simple cause-effect chains...