We won't go back. That's the thing, the false option. I think you underestimate how much being poor sucks. I personally call this the "it's better to reign in hell" principle.
So if we are dumb and don't cut emissions, we will "reign in hell," and it'll look like a dark cyberpunk dystopia. There might also be some pretty nasty wars and genocides in there.
I think that's the real choice we have. If we reduce carbon emissions enough, we can blunt the effects of climate change and adapt without too much pain. If we don't, we get to LARP Bladerunner with billions taking shelter in air conditioned mega-blocks when the deadly heat waves hit.
Nature isn't happy life in harmony. Nature is suffering and death. It's an amoral Darwinian meat grinder.
Let me make it concrete. I have kids. Let's say you give me a choice.
Option 1: I go to the future where we live closer to nature, more primitively, but my daughter died of a childhood disease.
Option 2: I go to the future that looks like Bladerunner or Kowloon Walled City with killer heat waves requiring air conditioning to survive, but my child is alive because of modern medicine.
I'd pick two and so would most people, which is why we'll never go back. The infant and child mortality rates alone in "wild nature" are enough to turn people away. It's better to reign in hell.
But I don't think we have to do that. We could do things like carbon taxes, provided we stop spending the social and political capital on guilt trip tactics and back to the land bullshit that will just be ignored, which is why I'm wasting my time ranting about this.
It's popular right now because the impacts are visibly getting worse. This weather event in Europe is far from normal, and the trend is accelerating.
If we fail to control it, what will happen is that we'll be reduced in population by an order of magnitude or two. We won't be able to sustain the technology we've created, we'll have mined easily accessible minerals and energy, and there is a real chance we will not return to being an advanced species in the same way we are today.
A simple reduction to greens vs not-greens is not helping anything. We can use more solar and wind. We can be more efficient with energy. We can stop burning hydrocarbons immediately and reserve the for material science and we can replace most car energy sources with electric.
None of this is even difficult, it just hurts some established interests who are fighting it with everything they have. They would rather that the planet get destroyed than to lose their wealth and power.
I'd prefer my kids not live in Bladerunner, also, and right now that's the path we're on.
We are, one way or the other. It is just a question of the choices we make on the way and how pre-industrial we end up.
There is no a position of leverage, the climate is behaving as modeled and expected. We know what will happen next.