Is this not obvious to others?
A simple, yet very effective old proverb is that when you find yourself in a hole, first stop digging.
There's a book that came out recently - "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie - that starts by digging into a two-pronged definition of the concept of "sustainability", where the first prong is about meeting the needs of current generations, and the second prong (which is the one we usually focus on when thinking about sustainability) is about maintaining an environment in which future generations can meet their needs as well.
The problem with most of what we're doing today is that it fails the second prong: future generations won't be able to meet their needs if the earth is too hot to support human civilization.
But the problem with your proposed solution is that it fails the first prong.
If you were dictator of the world and waved your wand such that nobody ever dug up another fossil fuel, starting from this moment, the result would be upheaval, privation, and death on a massive scale. Human civilization is, at this moment, dependent on digging up those fossil fuels and lighting them on fire.
So what the (great many) people who are working on this problem are doing is trying to navigate a path that threads a needle between these two bad outcomes, transitioning away from the dig-stuff-up-and-burn-it model to one that still works about as well - or ideally, even better! - for people currently living, without sacrificing the lives of people who will live in the future. And yeah, pretty much everyone involved thinks that does mean we'll dig up very little of those fossils, on the other side of this transition. But that is more like an effect than a cause.
Hope that helps!
Tomorrow is far too late. We should have started reducing our dependencies on oil since the 1970s.
It is an obvious idea - and it's totally fine to put out obvious ideas! - but that's also why there are so many well known and top of mind reasons that it is not the solution to our predicament.
To me, this is like a new student of algebra who thinks, "division is defined for all values of the denominator except zero, an obvious solution to that special case is that it should be defined for zero as well". It's an interesting idea for a student to have, but the reasons it doesn't work are very well known.
Of course we want to maintain and even grow, but there are costs to that.
To address the first prong, would it work to change our culture? Continuing to justify the massive amount of energy we convert, largely because we want to and not because we need to, feels like a problem with solutions that don't necessarily involve war.
Clearly we use more energy than we need, but I think lots of people hugely overestimate how much room there is to cut that without many many people dying. A very large amount of humanity's energy usage goes toward the food and other infrastructure of civilization that keeps people alive.
Improving energy efficiency is certainly one component of decarbonization. But to my knowledge, nobody suggests it is enough on its own, or even a particularly large portion of the mix of solutions.
I think the most helpful framing is to look out ~100 years. In 2124, will humanity be using fossil fuels? No, highly unlikely. Oil is done: either through depletion, or EROI descent, or explicit measures to cap CO2 pollution, or a combination. We will see a world without oil soon, one way or the other. The question is how gracefully can we make this transition without causing massive human suffering? Part of that graceful transition involves the responsible use of our remaining fossil hydrocarbons.
"Just stop oil" gives us zero chance of pulling off a smooth transition and plunges us straight into economic collapse with no regard for human well-being. "Drill-baby-drill" raises the risk of catastrophic climate crises with no regard for human well-being. Neither is a good mental framework if you care about helping humanity deal with this predicament.
And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too.
If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it!
Does a corporation's existence justify its continued existence? Like people, it'll try to keep on going, but it not being a person, it's okay to let these things go. People will lose jobs, but the answer to that is to revitalize the land so we can transition to getting our food nearby, and spending the time to do it- time well spent.
Computers, for example, are a fun diversion we enjoy thanks to our curiosity, ingenuity, and cheap (money-wise, not life-wise) energy. I don't consider them essential.
Letting go of a lot of our costly and polluting playthings is the way to go. Children cry when someone takes their candy away, and we'll be no different unless we realize that candy is killing us and we exercise our adult brains to change our habits.
Looking to the future, virtually the whole of humanity will drastically need to change the way they do things to cope with the changes in climate. It's likely too late now, but there would be far less changes needed if we stop pumping out so much CO2 into the air and thus reduce the likelihood of climate catastrophes.
> And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too.
Putting financial interests ahead of the health of our environments is how we got into this mess.
> If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it!
You've framed the problem in an unhelpful way - you're asking for a solution that perpetuates unsustainable practices.
We've been trying to convince people to emit less CO2 for decades and that sadly doesn't seem to be working well enough to get us out of this mess.
Some sources of electricity could be replaced by renewables, but not all. And certainly not as cheaply as oil or gas is.
And carbon capture in the oceans promises to be much more cost effective.
But then I believe we'll almost certainly want to go net-negative for some period of time. And we'll need to do a bunch of research and experimentation into carbon removal techniques to figure out how to do that. The earlier we start doing that, the better!
The realization that needs to be reached (but won't, because people don't think that way) to power real change is that it's not cheap; we just don't pay the externalities at the pump, so we get used to thinking that it's cheap.
Unfortunately it isn't. Most people still need to get from A to B and can't afford a Tesla.
But this threaten very powerful established interests, and those interests have been remarkably adept at mobilizing themselves and spreading disinformation, fear, and doubt in the population.
Even the most weak and financially friendly efforts are attacked and undermined. Like a carbon tax with a generous rebate -- like here in Canada, and a policy formerly advocated by conservative economists, but now a target of populist demagoguery and will likely be gone after the next election.
Conservative and neo-liberal ideological strains have spent 40+ years steadfastly eliminating the ability of central governments to plan and have coordinated industrial/macro-economic strategies in the west -- something they mostly had after WWII.
Now we desperately need it.
To wean ourselves off will be painful, but not impossible. Building strong local community is a good start; I've got to know a few neighbors now in this rural area and we're starting to offer to pick up groceries for each other, thus reducing the car trips to town. Building trust goes a long way to not needing to do everything yourself.
As long as environmental friendliness is a luxury, nothing is going to happen. This is the dynamic that needs to be disrupted, somehow.
In fact, might turn out to be not so cost effective either if it's almost impossible to force billions of people to change their habits.
How many people can Earth reasonably support?
Edit to answer your (rhetorical?) question: What we can do is build strong local connections; that's the first step towards decreasing our level of domestication, per Why We Need to be Wild, by Jessica Carew Kraft.
How you plan to strike those coal power stations?