2. Assuming you answered yes above, take small steps... eat less meat, drink less milk. Vote for politicians who care about the environment. Push for changes locally - bike lanes, mass transit, less car-based society. None of these take massive amounts of effort. Yes, none have a dramatic or immediate impact. But, you have to eat the elephant one bite at a time.
I personally think it’d be fairly easy to just require all new vehicles to have plugs. Already, EPA fuel consumption rules have helped cause over 70% of GM’s vehicles to be “micro hybrid” (integrated start/stop). Requiring all new vehicles to be plug in hybrid within, say, 5 years or so is well within the realm of possibility and would have little pushback since plug in hybrids work for literally everyone’s situation (if you can’t plug in, just don’t). And besides the near term benefits, that sets the stage for eliminating gasoline or at least making it very expensive, which today is political suicide. Everyone will desire access to charging, whether just ability to use a 120V outlet, or use destination chargers. Electricity is effectively as cheap as $1/gallon gasoline right now in my area, which means consumers (who might drive across town for a 10 cent per gallon gas price difference) will happily try to plug in whenever they can, making charging no longer a niche thing for 1% of drivers but something everyone wants and therefore easy to standardize for apartments, on-street parking, etc. 5-10 years after that, we can either start mandating new vehicles be completely emissionsfree.
How do people moving around on the planet make a difference? Especially since immigration moves people from more impoverished places, where they are more likely to have more kids, to less impoverished places, where they are less likely?
poor = small energy footprint
rich = large energy footprint
Assuming the problem is that the global energy consumption is too large, the last thing we want is to increase the energy footprint of the people we already have. Moving people from poor countries to rich countries means greatly increasing those people energy footprint. It is in direct contradiction to the stated goal of reducing the energy footprint of humanity, and serves as a strongly visible signal that the ruling class is not serious about reducing global emissions.
There is only one possible solution: replace CO2-intensive power sources like fossil fuels with low or zero CO2 power sources like nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar energy. If that can't be done fast enough, well enough, or affordably, then we should plan and prepare for climate change as a certainty.
We have the technology (solar, wind, nuclear, grid scale batteries, HVDC long range transmission lines, EVs), but do not have the political will. This is largely because the fossil fuel industry is powerful enough to block serious efforts, and because national economic and military competition incentivizes nations to defect from any CO2-reducing strategy and exploit cheap fossil fuels to get ahead quickly.
Sobering: As of 2021, there is no 'western lifestyle' country on the face of the Earth that has emissions in line with the requirements of the Paris accord emissions, which is about 2.5 CO2 t/year/capita for a global population of 10 billion (2050 estimate). Even countries like Sweden, Switzerland of France, which are >90% nuclear & renewable in their electricity production, still have 4.5, 4.7 and 5.1 t CO2 t/year/capita. I have yet to hear concrete proposals of where the 50% cuts should come from, other than large scale technologies that have not been developed yet.
It’s also hypocritical. “Could you do us a favor and stay poor to help solve this problem we mostly created?” That will get a big “fuck you.”
I am curious about the statistics you’re quoting. If 90% of power is electricity they are probably counting petrol cars and possibly the embodied energy in products manufactured abroad. It shows why the entire energy system must be converted and it must be global. If it’s not global rich countries will just outsource polluting industry and poorer countries will be happy to burn cheap fossil fuels to make money selling products back.
… but I am also pessimistic. We may eventually get there but not before serious weather changes that cause a lot of disruption.