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This is my bugbear so I'll say it again - because nobody's willing to bite the bullet.
If you consider human-caused climate change an imminent existential threat, you turn industrializing nations to glass using weapons of mass destruction, or any such weapon that has an outsized kill ratio to effort and value cost. You then promise to do the same to any society that rises above subsistence farming. It's not worth the risk that some guy might mine some coal and maybe build a steam engine. AI doomers, take note - if you're not willing to do this, as insane as Big Yud's missile strike proposal sounded in practice - then it's basically a moot point.
People are not rational beings. They are also content to offload any negative costs onto others as long as their own lifestyle and pleasures can be sustained - this is what winning means.
Currently, it can be best understood as a big political stick to beat people they don't like, because it exposes them to barely any political risk while offloading the problems onto their outgroup. You could address the political risk, but doing so requires more information than can easily fit in a tweet or soundbyte. This is a drug greater than any the pharmaceutical industry can ever produce; it combines the pleasure of feeling superior and self-righteous with that of making others suffer.
Yep, absolutely. For Butlerian Jihad to work, there has to be total escalation dominance, where trying to build AGI is banned everywhere, and any government that doesn't enforce that ban is knocked over and replaced with one that will. If a great power tries to not enforce it, the RoW has to have the willingness to go all the way:
RoW: You aren't enforcing the AI ban.
GP: Fuck you, we'll do what we want.
RoW: If you don't start enforcing the AI ban, we'll nuke you.
GP: If you nuke us, we'll nuke you back.
RoW: We know, but being nuked isn't as bad as getting exterminated by AI, so we've got nothing to lose.
GP: You're bluffing.
RoW: *launches nukes*
That's the goal line. Nothing short of that mindset will work, even if in practice I suspect that it could be implemented without requiring an actual nuclear war due to the limited number of great powers that need to get on board or decide not to force the matter (I have essentially zero hope that it could be implemented without war at all, but I think it could plausibly be just a few small and notoriously-defiant countries which have to be knocked over).
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I'm not going to go into the rest of your post, but as an environmentalist I don't think climate change is an imminent existential threat. First of all, there's nothing imminent about it - the process has already started. 2023 is the hottest year on record, and the previous holder of that esteemed title was 2022. Climate change is not some threat that could appear off in the distance, but a present reality. Coral reefs are bleaching, currents in the oceans and atmosphere are changing, ice is melting and the sea-level is rising. All of this is happening right now and if you live in the right places you can just go stick your head out of the window and see it.
At the same time, it isn't really that existential of a threat - if you're talking about humanity as a whole. If you want a good article which explains what I think is the most realistic evaluation of climate change outcomes, I recommend https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/
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How exactly do you propose that a society of subsistence farmers build WMDs?
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