We're talking about flying. You don't need to go back very far (less than 50 years) to get to a point where the majority of people in western countries never took a flight. We're absolutely not talking about resetting life to what it was like in the 1700s. We might possibly be talking about going back to what it was like in the 1980s, where flights where mostly for the very wealthy or something people did 4 or 5 times in their lifetime, but it's more likely it'd be nothing as dramatic as that.
Food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. We have used fossil fuels to prop up the carrying capacity of humans on the planet quite a bit.
This is why it is really important to ask questions about what we really need, and if we're at all interested in human survival in the future, we need make serious decision to scale down the economy soon.
Of course I'm not very optimistic that this will happen.
I suspect the efficiency and productivity gains from information technology mean computers and software engineering actually reduce the effect of climate change by improving most industries more than they contribute to climate change directly, but I don't have any hard evidence for that.
I said if we applied that logic to every industry, we'd set standards of living back centuries. The vast vast majority of what humans produce and consume is not essential for living, but if we cut it all out there wouldn't be much to live for.
