Will just share some brief points. As we pump more energy into the atmosphere, the climate will continue to change until a new equilibrium is reached. There will be winners and losers when that happens, recall that the Sahara was once a tropical jungle, or that CO2 ppm was higher during the jurassic era. Florida may be unhabitable but Wyoming may become a paradise. Any city, county, state, country that looks to be a winner does not benefit from contributing to climate change efforts and therefore will find little incentive in doing so.
Shifting focus to alternatives is noble, but the technology is years from maturation. It took us a long time to master the steam that drives electricity generation whether the plant is coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear (hydroelectric being the lone exception). These sources are mature enough to be reliable. We often take for granted the level of engineering effort involved in building and deploying a stable power grid. Switching to alternatives before they are mature will introduce instabilities across the grid, rolling brownouts/blackouts will be prevalent. Subways will shutdown in major cities at arbitrary times etc. It will dramatically reduce the quality of life. This is what happens in third world countries with inadequate and unstable grids. If you wonder why cellphones outsell desktops and laptops in Africa, this is partly why.
The energy density per unit volume that gasoline offers is unmatched by all other sources except nuclear. It’s stable and portable, and yes it definitely damages the environment when produced or consumed, but then every fuel source does. There’s certainly some great work on better batteries, but it’s years, potentially decades, away from production grade. It’s also unclear whether there won’t be other externalities from mining and transmuting rare earth metals at the scale required to replace gasoline. We may be trading one problem for another. The world is also slowly running out of potable water.
A big problem like climate change requires big solutions. A complete rethink of transportation, energy infrastructure, food production, housing, etc. at a national scale. And any sustainable solution will have to address population limits. But nobody has the courage to talk in those terms. Thing is, even if one country manages to wean itself off of fossil fuels, other, poorer countries will be happy to absorb the excess supply in the form of lower prices. How do we stop that? Put a global price on carbon? Look above for why certain countries won’t agree to that. That requires a one world govt., and we’re probably not getting one of those until we face a mass extinction event (meteor, aliens).
Climate change is the ultimate tragedy of the commons. And humanity has a terrible track record as far as the commons are concerned.