Devil's advocate here. The article mentions imminent "massive loss of lives and livelihoods". Wouldn't that lower emissions? ie, we aren't likely to need to keep smog factories pumping out pollution 24/7 when the population is slashed in half. I realize that's not an ideal scenario, but it's a fail-safe of sorts.
IMO this is the buried lede of the whole topic, any solution we come up with is going to look like a "controlled crash" in the sense that nature will force us to crash at some point
