Please read the classic book by Edward Tenner: Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, 1996 (oldie but goldie and must read for people who think technical solutions have no unintended (and irrevocable) consequences Mike eucalyptus trees in California, or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad in Australia, among others.
Well, no, we have to do something that will help. Doing something that makes things worse isn't the answer, and the worse things are, the less we can afford to do so.
"This might help, but also might really mess things up" is not the answer - not in politics, not in economics, and not in climate change.
But I agree with one part of your post. Persuading nations to become poorer voluntarily is not a viable strategy.
Framing it as such is doing propaganda's work.
Oil is a drug for the world’s economies. If you remove it, the economy plummets with billions of starving people because everything is grown, produced or transported using fossil fuels
> If you remove it, the economy plummets with billions of starving people
Sounds like quite a sacrifice to me.
The alternative to fossil fuels and the climate crisis is basically an incredibly deadly and uncomfortable step out of the industrialized world. No one is making that decision. It's a fancy trolley problem where the amount of people on the tracks has 10 figures on both sides and blurry timelines.
Just the increase of gas prices due to the iran war is going to cause some fucked up harvests in africa, south america and asia. The poorest farmers aren't able to afford fertilizers. I have a coworker who has ties in Guinea-bissau. The farmers there are basically getting spitroasted by the combination of climate changed caused droughts messing up their cash crops followed by increased oil prices due to wars they have nothing to do with increasing the price of their agricultural inputs. Your simplistic view on fossil fuels will not keep them alive long enough to see the even worst effects of climate change that are coming. If it was easy to stop emitting greenhouse gases we would've managed to do it 25+ years ago.
Also, if it weren’t so profitable.
In this environment we will still need to geoengineer the planet for as long as the carbon we have already burned remains in the atmosphere. We are already way outside the pre-industrial baseline. And carbon capture is very energy-intensive, so no matter how much of our solar energy abundance we put into it, we are going to be geoengineering for decades.