Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
No, there's really just a few select politicians standing in the way. Governments around the world have implemented tons of policies to attempt to address the crisis, but unless every country participates, it's economically suicidal. Carbon-intensive industries can simply move to the US, strengthening them, while those countries attempting to carry the burden of preventing climate change will be equally affected by looming disasters.
Because the US is the only country that defected from the Paris agreement. The US is the only country led by climate change deniers. Tons of countries are led by malevolent and selfish leaders, but none are as incompetent and unpredictable as the US.
Climate change mitigation is a collective action problem in the form of a prisoner's dilemma or a tragedy of the commons. If every agent (i.e. country) refuses to cooperate, every agent will suffer major damage from environmental disasters. If all agents cooperate, they only suffer minor damage from economic policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
At first sight, this doesn't seem like much of a problem. The solution seems self-evident, before one considers countries adopting different strategies:
If one country defects, they benefit massively from hosting the world's carbon intensive processes, yet all countries will equally share in environmental catastrophe. Thus, the optimal strategy for any single self-interested agent is always to defect, no matter what the others do. Paradoxically, the optimal strategy for each agent in isolation leads to a catastrophically bad outcome for all agents if they all choose that strategy. Everyone wants to be the parasite, but if no one is the host, we all die.
It wouldn't matter if the US were a tiny island nation, but the US has the largest carbon footprint, the largest economy, and the most capable military. The US led the democratic world. They could have solved the prisoner's dilemma by enforcing global cooperation. If the US and its allies would threaten to sanction those countries who don't cooperate, the payout matrix would shift towards cooperation being a stable Nash-equilibrium. It would no longer be in a country's interest to screw everyone else over, so they'd stop. The US and the entire world would be better off.
* has been the largest cummulative emmitter of CO2,
* has "outsourced" much of the emissions due to its current consumption levels to offshore manufacturers such as China,
* was an early recognizer of the serious implications of CO2 emmissions causing AGW, going back to the 1970s,
* was and still is home to some of the largest fossil fuel companies that have been activly gaslighting the world about the realities of AGW since the 1970,
* is, or at least was, a global leader that was admired with an aspiration lifestyle that has set the tone for lifestyle globally - a lifestyle with consumption and emission attributes that have disasterous side effects if attained globally.
There are some 190+ countries about the globe, it's very much the case that not all countries are equal actors in this issue.
Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.