>That's why we need political action.
Where? Political action int he U.S. or Europe doesn't do much to China and telling China "sorry, you can't have cheap electricity, your people don't get to have a lifestyle like ours as a result" isn't likely to make the Chinese go "oh, ok, we'll stop growing our middle class and go back to a basic village lifestyle to save the rest of you".
Unless we miraculously convert to a global government then reducing emissions just isn't likely to happen. Reduce in one place and it'll continue to increase in a few others.
The fact of the matter is, the only realistic solution out of this is a majority of the world's population goes "Ok we'll only drive to work/school/the grocery, we'll never take travelling vacations unless we walk or bicycle there, we'll stop eating all meat, we'll give up plastic packaging and we won't replace our electronics when they wear out".
Otherwise we have to hope and pray that a fleet of alien trade ships show up on orbit and are like "If you give us syndication rights to the galactic hegemony for Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy we'll go ahead and install a thousand of our zero point modules around the planet and tie them into your local grids to solve your energy needs. If you give us the syndication rights to The Simpsons we'll give you a few thousand of these solid state devices that attract carbon out of the air causing it to solidify into inert bricks that you can then fill your pit mines with".
We're seriously in that sort of state. You either outlaw electricity from fossil fuels in every country in the world or you hope for a true miracle.
Even if someone figures out cold fusion today and can start churning out the first power plants in January, replacing the 60,000~ power plants in the world it would take decades at best to replace them and making the concrete for pouring the foundations alone would create an insane amount of CO2 not to mention all of the structural steel.
Short of ET intervention, the best we can hope is that developing nations stop building fossil fuel power plants and that people start leaving coastal cities and building better designed, more eco-friendly, more distributed, with equally dispersed permaculture centers, with rail lines in grids to provide for efficient transportation of people and goods, cities far inland.