A number of points that are left out in this discussion:
(1) The two largest nations in the world will not go along with CO2 reduction solutions that retard or make more expensive their growth in energy generation. China is a nuclear armed, totalitarian country that is building coal fired power plants and new coal mines every day, while giving lip service to climate issues. Sure, they’ll make agreements for future reductions, and then ignore them when it serves their purpose. India can’t afford the huge expense to reduce its carbon footprint using solar and/or wind, or nuclear.
(2) Much of the world lives in energy poverty. Do we tell those people to just keep on living in misery? They cannot afford expensive solutions, but they do need reliable, affordable electricity, and transportation.
(3)Solar and wind are intermittent sources of energy and require vast expenses to back them up. Don’t count on Moore’s Law like improvements in battery technology to get around the problem, and the costs of batteries are incredibly expensive when used in the grid storage context. The low costs you hear bantered around do not take the intermittency costs into account. I write as an engineer who has studied the impact of intermittent (“non-dispatchable”) sources of energy on electric grids.
(4) The materials required for a wind and solar solution require vast amounts of energy to acquire, through a scale of mining the world has never seen, including of rare earths, the extraction of which is highly toxic. This is especially true of batteries, whether for the grid or to power electric vehicles (which is likely one reason Toyota is betting on hydrogen, not electricity, for automobile power).
(4) Any medium range solution that doesn’t involve nuclear technology as the primary energy source is simply not serious. Nuclear is the greenest source out that, period. But, it too is expensive - but extremely reliable.
(5) The end-of-the-world rhetoric is not backed up by valid science. CO2 does cause warming. Few people know (or would understand) that the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere is logarithmic - double the CO2 once, get X degrees of warming. Double it again, and you get just another X, even though you now have 4 times as much CO2.
But everyone is scared of warming, and not considering *adapting* to it rather than impoverishing the world in a likely-to-fail attempt to stop the warming. But mankind has adapted to all sorts of changes, and certainly the biome has adopted to extreme changes. Warming won’t destroy the world, won’t end mankind, or destroy nature. Neither will a marginal addition of CO2 to the oceans.
Given all of this, I view the well intentioned arguments and proposals by those who want to “solve” the problem as being short-sighted, more a moral panic than a serious attempt to deal with the issue, more a “feel good” solution for the world’s well off population than anything serous.
One more comment - there's lots of talk about evil corporations, or capitalism, etc, blocking solutions. That's just a distraction. The large companies would be just as happy selling you solar power or whatever as selling you gasooline. And the discussion also obscures the profit intentions of many proposing "alternative energy" solutions, not to mention how the advocacy organizations are driven by contributions in response to induced panics - if they ever solve a problem, they have no more poit in existing.
