It is possible for us to work together and fix these things.

Edit:

Moving away from leaded gas might be another example.

(CFCs and leaded gas invented by the same dude, fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. Quite a legacy...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

Banning CFCs perhaps?

If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse

I wouldn’t underestimate human ingenuity when there is a clear problem. Things like this, it’s still hypothetical. Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility, certainly not when the proposed solution is some kind of global authoritarian communism, and it always is.

I’m upset that we don’t put more into carbon capture and other technological solutions now and waste all our time on some proxy political battle, but that’s where we are. When things get really bad we will build a solution.

I.E. avoiding population collapse due to lack of ecosystem carrying capacity? Eliminating famine? etc.

Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.

Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.

Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.