I guess I'll be the outlier in this thread.
Let's start with a question....what would an actual solution or solutions to climate change look like?
New technology doesn't just spring up overnight. You wake up one day, and the POTUS is announcing some govt Manhattan mega project or some white-haired inventor announces that he can make energy from seawater....NOPE.
Others will tell you that solutions are IMPOSSIBLE, because they can never be FAST enough. Our energy grid took many decades to build, same for housing and building stock, car technology is mature and can't be improved. That we need to change NOW and there are no solutions that can be that fast. This thinking is also wrong.
Solutions to climate change will require that they provide the services that people need/demand, and that they be CHEAPER and BETTER than current, fossil-fueled tech. And even when that tech exists, it will have some maximum growth rate and learning curve, which according to myriad tech examples in history corresponds to an exponential growth rate that doubles at the fastest, every 18 months or so, and the slowest, about 4-5 years just to double. Things like the iPhone, Color TV and LED light bulbs....fast. Washing Machines and telephones....slow.
So I claim that in fact all (or nearly all) the solutions we need to significantly reduce emissions (>60%) already EXIST, are ready for prime time, are in fact already in the field and growing exponentially (at a fast rate), and are doing so (with a few inevitable exceptions) around the world.
That is, multiple major industries around the world are being disrupted...electricity production and automobiles being the biggest and most important.
The original report linked by BG points out that total emissions from the US power sector have been falling for years, while the economy has been growing, and (light) manufacturing has been rebounding. This is bc new technology has reduced electricity demand in the US relative to the services it provide. A lot of that is LED lighting in residential and commercial spaces. So demand has been flat during a growth phase in the US economy. And the rise of (cheap) natgas, wind and solar has displaced coal generation. Net result....US electricity sector emissions have fallen for several years...and real prices have been flat.
Note that this happened almost invisibly. YOU did not have to put solar panel on your roof, batteries in your basement or mortgage your house to build a giant wind turbine in your backyard. Instead, your utility (or the one a town over) built some solar or wind farms, when their bean counters told them it made sense to do that financially (instead of building a new coal plant) or, some entrepreneur built that stuff and your utility agreed to buy power from them at a market rate. Invisible to you.
Your part so far...you saw LED bulbs in Home Despot for like $2, spent 30 seconds thinking about it (and deciding that was free money right there), you bought a bunch, and spend 20 minutes putting them all over your house. And then you forgot about it. Done.
And you do a lot of internet on your smartphone now, instead of a 2000-vintage desktop with a CRT.
And you watch an LED backlit HD flatpanel, that uses much less juice than your old Sony Trinitron behemoth.
(And partial thanks to, ahem, Al Gore's Energy Star program)
Add it all up, and US electricity sector emissions have (probably) peaked, like several years ago already. Because even if electricity demand grows this year, or over the next ten years, renewables and natgas are taking over fast now.
The OP report says that total US emissions climbed largely bc of transportation. We are just driving more miles with cheap gas and economic activity. Our new cars are larger, but they are also more efficient than the ones they are replacing...so the fleet average mileage is not climbing.
And of course, the solution here is EVs. You have heard that they are going to take over, and maybe you don't believe it.
Believe it. Two words: cheaper and better.
Last November, the US passed 1 million plug-in cars on the road, two years after Obama's stated goal. EV sales are up and down, but look to me like they are doubling every 2 to 2.5 years, and jumped massively 6 months ago with the Tesla Model 3, whose sales are crushing every FF car (mostly from Germany and Japan) in its price class. Like those makers are seeing big double digit declines in sales in 2018 relative to 2017. I'm not a big Elon fan...but that is a classic 'Made in America' story that you don't seem to hear much about. Instead we get him smoking legal weed on a radio program.
So, something like 3-4% of new sedans sold in the US are plugins. 360,000 sold last year (and half of those are Tesla-badged, believe it or not). Another 1.5 million sold worldwide. Yup, bad old China, with all those coal-burning poor peasants....they are buying 1 million EVs per year, on a much smaller installed auto base. Right now, each of those Chinese people have a per capita CO2 emission less than half of the average American. It looks like with EVs, as they become wealthier, they will never catch up with us in emissions.
There is no point in arguing...EVs are where digital cameras were in 2002. They were cheap and crappy, or not crappy and too expensive. Just. Its like your photography-buff uncle saying back then that digital would never take over, because $200 digital handhelds were worse than film cameras, and fancy digital SLRs (that were equivalent to film quality) cost like $2000.
We all know how that shook out a few years later. Better AND Cheaper crushed film.
EVs will be better and cheaper than FF cars soon. And a couple years after that, better and cheaper EV SUVs and pickups. And at that point they will be in the third world also...bc cheaper.
As for Climate Change science....I think it is easy to be discouraged about the state of the public dialog. But on the bright side, there are only a handful of countries whose govts don't believe in Climate Change. The major ones now are the US and Yemen. Russia is on the fence. That's it. Everyone else gets it. Signed onto Paris. Are fostering the disruption.
And the US IS bringing up the rear, with the stubbornly high per capita emissions (by far the highest for any large nation over 100M people). But even we are making progress, and the disruption is well underway here too. Despite fossil funded media shills telling us otherwise.
So, are the above 'solutions' enough? Not really. They will get there, and with predictable accelerating factors (from future tech) we will avert the WORST possible CC outcomes. But there will be plenty of damage, climate refugees and animal and oceanic extinctions.
Bad, BAD chit. Take a minute and weep for the children unborn, and the broken and diminished natural world we will bequeath them.
But these are nonetheless the solutions that we HAVE TODAY. Let's go support them...
--pay an extra penny or two for local 100% green power.
--buy offsets for $20 when you buy an airline ticket.
--if you can, put solar on your roof.
--buy a suitable EV, and enjoy its better-ness!
This all sends price/demand signals to the govts, utilities and entrepreneurs/investors that the disruption is coming, and they best get on it, or left behind.
And its cool to tell the kids and grandkids.
