There's a lie in there, but it's one you've been told. We wouldn't necessarily need to sacrifice anything. Our standard of living could remain roughly the same, as long as a certain small percentage of the population saw their standard of living dramatically decrease to something resembling our own.

I don't think many people have good understanding of what living standard even actually means, which in turn causes fear and anxiety when they are told it would drop. And I think it is much overexaggerated how much this drop would actually affect daily life for majorty of the people around the world.

We would need to sacrifice a significant amount of living standard to stop it right now,

No we wouldn't. Tax the rich and use the money to pay for green energy infrastructure, public transit, and denser housing. Boom, instant increase in jobs, transport options, and quality of life once the new walkable housing is done.

Tackling climate change is easy and it will make our lives better.

Yeaaahh, see, our living standard is going to drop because of climate change anyway. If we act sooner we get more choices about how and who suffers.

I prefer a handful of billionaires "suffer" now instead of literally billions of poor people in a couple of decades.... That's a choice we could make.

Not a vote winner, obvs. So we'll just continue to sleepwalk into the unknown.