Given how long these problems have been staring us in the face, it's truly hard not to be totally pessimistic about the future. If we haven't changed yet, do we even have the capacity to do so?
The world is (one hopes) just beginning to emerge from a global disaster of a known variety, for which there has been longstanding scientific and technical understanding, as well as existing paybooks for dealing with the situation. Response by the most capable and technologically-advanced countries has often been abysmal.
The coming global energy transition is going to be orders of magnitude more complex and fraught than the COVID-19 pandemic has been. And this is uncharted territory, with no tested playbook (the IPCC guidelines and publications are at least a playbook), and ongoing dissent within and among countries as to measures to be taken and how costs are to be allocated.
William Ophuls studied this question beginning in the late 1960s. His PhD dissertation in political science at Yale was published as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity[1] in 1977 (it's been revised since), and the question has been Ophuls's life work.[2]
In particular, Ophuls's assessment of the global situation in the 1970s, the likely developments in ensuing decades, which 44 years on we can compare against history, and likely sticking points yet to come, stand out. Ophuls is a realist, but an optimist (perhaps somewhat less of the latter with time). He does see a path out. But it hasn't been the path chosen over the past five decades.
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Notes:
1. Ophuls: https://archive.org/details/ecologypolitics00ophu
2. Bibliography: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3Ao...
But do I feel like a hero for all the fuel I saved, the carbon I didn't emit, the road space I freed up? Do I feel like I made a difference? No, all I did was make it easier for others to do those things, and boy did they ever continue doing them, in increasing numbers, the entire time. Even my so-called people, transportation reform "activists," bend over backward not to "shame" each other for buying cars, and buying cars to replace the cars they bought before. So I feel more like a sucker than a hero when I consider all that. In the end it has to be about just getting outside and enjoying the fresh air.
That's the #1 area to solve for any future civilization and we are going to need a hell of a lot more than what wind, solar or even fossil fuel can deliver in the future. Energy-density is where it's at IMO.
I imagine global warming will present many such problems with solutions that will have no impact on global warming itself.
Climate and nature have always been a problem for humans, and will always be a problem for humans. The good news is that we have never been better able to deal with the problems that the climate throws at us even if some of them are partially self-inflicted.
If you are worried about climate change because of CO2 emissions there is one problem you need to solve and that is energy. Not by some low energy-dense and elaborate daisy-chain rube-goldberg constellation that will only make energy more expensive, require all sorts of backup and complex infrastructure and thus make it harder for poor people to get out of poverty and as you point to, not actually change much.
Instead look for clean, energy-dense solutions like Thorium, Fusion or maybe even some sort of fuel-cell that can scale at affordable economics. We are going to need a lot more energy in the future so better find something that actually works on large scale, that's the #1 problem to work on.
Unbridled optimists sell woo.
You're confusing realism with presentism, or perfectionism (in the sense that the present is "perfect" and fully developed).
Realism is neither.
Optimism is the rejection of unwanted, unpleasent, or inconvenient truths.
What I find hard to understand is that you pit realism as the antonym of optimsim. The correct antonym is pessimism.
Both optimism and pessimism are biases. Realism is the absense of bias.
Realists are navigators, optimists are starters, pessimists are never-starters :)
You need bias to move things forward.
That's perseverence without denial.
Realism to correctly assess the situation and dynamics.
Hope and/or perseverence to follow those through to their potential.
Again: optimism denies reality. It gets you into trouble eventually, even if it can glide over some rough spots. At best, optimism can limit self-sabotage or inhibition. It does nothing to change the Universe itself.