Time to Panic
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I suspect the nature of the problem is poorly understood. A lot of the focus in north america is on personally reducing. This feels similar to not littering, not spraying pesticides on your lawn, in other words not polluting locally.
But CO2 isn't a local problem. It's global. Reducing use in one spot or making use in a given case doesn't necessarily work. There's always a use for more energy globally, so someone else with a lower standard of living will justifiably want to take up what you don't use. Meanwhile, if a process is made more efficient, this frees up energy to be used elsewhere in the system. Jevon's paradox plays a role here too.
Global emissions are up, not down. Greatly up. Everything we've done so far has accomplished precisely nothing on the global warming front. We are richer, more people are out of poverty. Because we optimized for that, and not for lower co2 production, globally.
The central issue is that co2 is cheaper than alternatives, in at least enough cases that it's still widely used. Solar etc are dropping in cost, but not so much that they've cut carbon.
A carbon tax would raise the price of co2 and encourage use of alternatives. This could be combined either with an international agreement in other countries to tax carbon, or a system of tariffs on countries that don't.
The system wouldn't be perfect, but it would actually stand a chance of having us switch to non carbon methods.
People keep thinking about how technology will fix stuff. But technology doesn't fix cultural or anthropological problems.
If this doesn't happen or isn't possible, then we're likely doomed. A carbon tax will make us discover whether we can survive or not sooner.
After that, all bets are off, we won't have the GDP for building the clean grid of cheap renewables, and we'll switch to disaster capitalism. It's going to be crop failures after flooding after deadly heatwaves after war after diseases.
I honestly have a hard time figuring the best course of action, baring a massive financial sector meltdown and a huge recession - and that's a very, very shitty scenario, i'm not downplaying it.
But still way better than a world at 4 degrees.
With enough clean energy, extensively deployed, all we're probably going to achieve is some really cheap oil that is in search of new uses and products to be drilled for. Banning oil use will be interesting to watch.
But you're not fully right on one aspect of your post: we are replacing fossil fuels, energy use is declining, and technology is one of the biggest reasons for it. And as developing countries grow, they will likely skip directly over the Western world's worst abuses of nature, because the better technology is cheaper, easier to deploy, and can be done more incrementally than huge GW installations.
Furthurmore, technology is not separate from the cultural or anthropological issues, and is merely one of the cultural and anthropological issues: what technology we develop, what technology we use and deploy are entirely determined by that.
The political realm has mostly failed at any sort of broad climate action, except in one way: to allow a small little space on the fringe to develop renewable tech. And now that renewables are cheaper than coal, and getting cheaper than natural gas, technology is changing our impact on nature by taking advantage of our current cultural leanings (spend the least amount of money possible, make profits, have economically sustainable decisions, etc.). Politics have failed when it's come to climate change, but technology has done much much more.
And look at residential solar, it's marketed to consumers as "you can save this much money," not "you will stop emitting this much carbon dioxide." Why is the economic sales pitch possible? Because of technology. Why is this positive move made? Because of technological change, rather than the direct cultural change of masses of consumers.
It would be great if we can also other aspects of culture, in addition to our technology use, but these are not unconnected things, not diametrical, and are in fact intricately connected.
Technology is an absolutely crucial part of fundamental climate action, and there is no way to ignore that. We need to both allow technology change, encourage it, and encourage action, and also enable non-technology cultural changes that enable zero-carbon.
If there's another route that does not use technology as a core pillar, I'd like to hear about it, in the interest of trying everything and anything, let's hear it.
I think it has to be something in the spirit of a constitutional amendment, at least for the US. A balanced carbon budget amendment. And that's a bar that we're a long way from reaching.
But not impossibly hard. The Montreal protocol on CFC's had to get everybody to agree, and it has worked quite well. This solution doesn't require global agreement, just collect it at the border of countries that don't sign on.