Bill S adds a good comment (though, personally, I hate emphasizing #1, but I admit it's probably needed):
1) Electrification of everything is not likely to be the solution, as indicated in Das’ essays. Liquid and gaseous fuels, whether derived from fossil sources, biomass or some other source, will be with us for the foreseeable future.
2) Radical conservation must be part any realistic solution. The whole world cannot bear the frivolous use of energy that is typical in the Anglosphere (and Europe, China, Russia, et al.) This does not have to mean a reduction of quality of life, tho’. It just means that we need to stop making tons of throw-away stuff and repair & reuse the stuff that we need. Fast fashion, yearly iPhone upgrades, bottled water and low-cost airlines, for example, should cease to exist. The private car will probably have to go as well – as it is a huge resource sink that spends most of its time in parking-lots and garages.
3) Stop the War Machine. This is a huge resource sink that produces huge GG quantities with little of benefit to humanity at large.
4) Destroy the Financialization Machine. Put finance back in its place as a facilitator of productive economic activity instead of an end in itself. IMHO, the idea that the goal of corporations is “making money for shareholders” instead of creating real wealth for the benefit of society as a whole is just insane. Financialization drives the whole extraction business and will not stop until either it is stopped or we are all consumed in the fire.
Given difficulties we face, amidst a huge global population and everything else, I can't fault China or others in principle for building some more fossil fueled sources at present. We need to walk and chew gum at the same time. (In specific cases, such as in the USA, I can say we could be doing much better.)
I could be wrong, but I can't imagine it happening before a major collapse of societies and populations, and collapse won't make it any easier either.
We need to try to make the transition as fast as possible, but also minimizing the environmental destruction it will require along the way.
We need to resist greenwashing, such as way oversized electric SUV's, and do the 'smaller' thing along with the renewable energy transition, if not even faster. We should have started on smaller 70 years ago if not more. (But then, the message was that "Electricity will be too cheap to meter.")
We need to avoid the kind of irresponsible and careless optimism that Das calls Micawberish. Techo-optimists, cornucopians, and their ilk rely too much on hope. Too often centrists do as well. Meanwhile, perhaps half of the global population lives in ecocidal denial, aided by many who concoct bogus and/or cherry picked data to 'prove' that global warming is not happening.
However, we still have to have some hope there can be a good future for human and other lives, and that this is important. We need just enough hope to get us to do all we can now (with an emphasis on the downsizing part first), but with a clear vision of the obstacles we face nevertheless.
In order to have that smidgeon of hope, we also have to hope that some new things we can't foresee will help, while it is also certain that some new things we can't foresee will make things worse.
Even though the situation appears hopeless, and we mustn't deny the problems involved, we can doubt that we know everything well enough to prove there is no hope. That is where and how doubt is most useful.
It is better to light one candle, than to curse the darkness.
As I have long said.
(Often claimed to be an old Chinese proverb, that seems not to have been established. The first known use is in a sermon published in 1907. I learned it from Peanuts.)
*****
There are those who believe the adoption of EV's should proceed as fast as possible. I may concur with that (though I'm not sure) but I'm pretty sure it won't happen fast anyway, and won't help much anyway, and will create many new problems regardless of speed.
I'm troubled by the alleged low manufacturing cost of EV's. In particular, I believe current EV's exist relatively cheaply on the back of an already existing lithium battery capacity. Expanding that capability will be costly in money and environmental integrity. And especially in the context of a new cold and/or hot war with both Russia and China. China is currently the #1 producer of lithium in the world. Lithium is widely available, but very environmentally costly to mine. It's dirty as heck. Americans don't much want to do it, they want others to do it. That may work OK in a world that's not at war, and where we can only cheaply buy American in the future.
But rather than push the costs of lithium sky high, what's equally if not more likely is that they just won't materialize fast anyway. New gas cars are unlikely to disappear by 2030. That will be managed...politically....
Anyway, regardless of cost, there is the environmental cost of all the new mines and factories, or especially the ones that would be needed to meet ambitious goals.
I'm not sure how to weigh local vs global issues in these regards, I've suggested using the effect on species extinction. But I suspect that's very problematic.
Also I'm not so sure about claims like the ones that EV's last 20% longer. EV batteries certainly won't last as long as conventional cars, and when they fail there are many reasons why they might not be replaced, including that their technology may have become obsolete. Gas cars can be run for decades with relatively low cost rebuilding.
Finally, transportation* is only 29% of total emissions in USA (and generally even less elsewhere). That means that 71% of the problem is unchanged by the electric transition. Much if not most of our transition efforts should go into that 71%.
If only half of the 29% problem is solved by converting all transportation to electric (because it only cuts lifecycle emissions in about half--which I think is very optimistic in the near term decade or two because of all the new mining and manufacturing infrastructure needed), that means we are only solving 14.5% of the problem in doing so.
Car emissions could also be drastically reduced with smaller cars and fewer driven miles, that probably ought to be the biggest focus. But it's not how profits are made.
Even more radical solution, such as re-centering cities and deploying ubiquitous mass transportation, require even bigger (almost inconceivable) investment which would best take place over decades. A conceivable long term is turning suburbia into small farms--what much of it was 75 years ago--with large quantities of the now suburban populations migrating back into city centers, served by mass transit.
Ubiquitous personal transport is probably not a long term sustainable model in the context of eliminating CO2 emissions or handling other resources. Cutting CO2 in half just isn't good enough, and all the extra manufacturing required will be economically and environmentally costly and on an ongoing basis. Perhaps best to start thinking past it now. We have to envision human society with much smaller energy consumption, which means high density urban living for most at anything like current global population levels. Only those engaged in farming, mining, or similar activities should live far enough from city centers to require non-rail transportation (and perhaps most of that work should be done by robots first, simply for these reason). Rail transportation, meanwhile, does not need large battery production, though it will require enormous investment in construction with social relocation being the biggest part.*
That kind of radical change would ultimately reduce other energy and CO2 costs. But still, there will be far more to be solved, or at least resolved, such as military CO2 emissions.
(*A friend of mine, with whom I lived with for awhile in San Francisco, believed that for some reason, Americans couldn't run good rail systems. There does seem to be some factual basis for that observation. Meanwhile other countries who may fail in other ways, have wonderful rail transportation systems. If true, that suggests yet another fundamental issue, perhaps requiring major social and institutional change which I couldn't define except by calling it Communism.)
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