The question is not "if" but "when". Sure renewables are becoming bigger every day but will we have enough of them before getting into climate catastrophe ? That's the question...
We're almost surely going to have substantial warming. But it's a stretch to go from that to doom. We may end up seeing albedo modification as a stopgap.
Beyond the warming, the consequences of climate change are very real. Hurricanes that used to be the feat of a decade are now an over-yearly occurrence.
Beyond climate change, the consequences of pollution are very real. Many water sources can't be drunk anymore, and the agro industry is killing bees/insects (necessary for vegetal life) on a wide scale and depleting the soil of its water/nutrients turning it slowly into a desert.
Extinction is far off, but "doom" is a very likely outcome at this point given that no government is doing anything, besides advocating for "green growth" which is the opposite of what ecologists have been preaching for decades (green degrowth).
Climate change is real for me. Heat wave + asthma are sometimes really tough to endure; big winds and more frequent floods (and more extreme) have destroyed the budget of the some parts of the state I live in for a very long time: it means no more budget for other things such as helping those who need it, maintaining infrastructures for schools, sports, etc.
Sure, it's not your Hollywood catastrophe, but the burden will become heavier on all of us. And if the rich (which I'm part of, sort of) can get out of it, they'll have to live with more social unrest...
Beyond limited fossil fuels and biomass, the only reliable permanent and least toxic source of energy needed to make use of existing resources is the Sun. We might as well get very good at it ASAP. It will take only a few percent of sunlight to supply today's world energy demands.
It's clear that we can't, as the author suggests, "begin to run low of coal in the centuries to come".
I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade, and for carbon capture to become a practical thing on the next one. But depending on what you want, even this isn't enough.
> I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade
That's really good news ! I mean it's so far away from what I know that I sure have missed something. Could you give a few pointers that illustrate your expectation ? (honest question)
I am more optimist than normal here. Most people take different conclusions from the same data.
But I do expect electrification to increase a lot this decade, and for renewables to take over the electricity generation so completely that other sources will only be able to compete with batteries, not with original renewable electricity.
If you extend our current trends, you will get into more than half of the energy being non-polluting. But most of it being new consumption, instead of replacing older sources.
Most sources on electricity agree to an unsettling level, so they are probably repeating each other. Here's one as good as any:
What will change on this decade that people usually don't take into account on their conclusions is that wind to a small extent and PV for a huge extent are already cheaper than most electricity sources, and getting cheaper by the day. The limits on PV price are so low we probably won't even be reach them this decade.
That places a real force on every process that heavily uses energy to take advantage of that cheap PV energy, or get outcompeted. Or in other words, the economic reality that have always got in the ways of renewables are now getting in the way of fossil fuels. So I expect the fossil fuel infrastructure to become obsolete and that new renewable energy that we will get to replace it instead of adding to it.
Notice that this is already happening on that data above. On a linear trend it's not fast enough to replace half of our emissions this decade, but on an exponential trend, it's more than fast enough. Well, the change into renewables has been exponential for decades already, that's how immature technologies work. Given that the limits on PV price are so low, I still don't expect it to change this decade.