"Climate change is beatable. We can even make money while beating it!" .....
..though not likely in a market economy where 'renewables plus storage' remain more expensive than coal. And as you say, even when renewables plus storage ARE cheaper, the profit-driven fossil industry won't just say "oh well time's up, let's just close shop...." ...profits before people, remember.
At Davos last year, the BIS said: "central banks** might have to buy the fossil industry".
Indeed. We can be sure them fossil industries ain't gonna go quietly.....
**authorized to issue debt-free money, or rather create money 'ex nihilo', to fund the transition in all nations, in order to avoid price rises for electricity consumers, and ultimately reduce them to near zero (with maintenance of green infrastructure the only expense).
Thank you for the note of optimism, I needed it ... Perhaps Americans need to relate more clearly the devastations of the climatic disasters that they suffer periodically with their last causes, and understand that they will probably increase in the future
Another huge reason for Climate optimism is nuclear power! Public opinion on nuclear power is much more favorable than it was a generation ago (although it isn't where it needs to be) and advances in waste storage and small modular reactors make me optimistic about nuclear's role in the global energy transition. I'd love to read your thoughts on nuclear.
I'm generally favorable to nuclear as well however I feel like a lot of people formed their opinions on nuclear 20, 30 or more years ago. Since then solar/wind has dropped 90% in costs. Nuclear for all its merits will never drop 90% barring a 'Mr. Fusion' level discovery. Even if all NIMBYism and supposedly hostile regulations were dropped, you can't drop the cost of a large plant that much.
I feel then that many nuclear advocates need to rethink their views on nuclear, not to reject them but to recognize the shift. Let's consider the 1980/90s when moving printed stuff back and forth was very important (i.e. mail, books, magazines). Yes fax machines did exist but they only applied documents a few pages long. The approaching future world was going to drop costs of text by 90%+. What happened? Today we still have the mail, printed magazines and newspapers. But it is not the same, the ability to digitally move texts around almost for free has shaken up all those industries....I think Newsweek is not even available anymore as a print magazine.
Nuclear advocates should consider the world they are advocating is going to have to shift quite a bit that these sources dropped 90% versus a world where they did not move down much at all. I agree modular reactors are probably a good way to address that, esp. in cases where it is more important to get a lot of heat generated rather than electricity itself.
While installing solar and wind remains cheap, the costs of intermittency remain very high, and they increase exponentially as the proportion of the grid coming from solar/wind approaches 100%. Unless there is a huge breakthrough in storage technology reliable zero carbon sources such as nuclear or hydro will be essential for any electricity grid. Another issue with solar and wind is that there is very strong local opposition to their installation, a major issue in high density countries which do not have authoritarian governments.
OK but again costs have dropped 90% so even if you need to build out twice as much solar capacity it's not implausible.
Local opposition to wind has been a thing, although wind has grown. Opposition to solar is a bit silly unless you have places also opposed to roofs. Home battery systems like the Tesla Wall are also a thing making the grid more decentralized. Instead of one supplier selling power you have many small suppliers essentially selling power to each other and the grid becomes more like a Ebay.
A lot of opposition to solar/wind seems to really be opposition to anything that changes the grid itself, which I think probably should be challenged. Just like on Ebay, you can still have huge suppliers on the grid in a different world. Nuclear/hydro and other massive generators would still be around.
Even if solar cost nothing to install the cost of storage to cope with 24 hour and seasonal fluctuations is huge, if indeed it is even possible. This makes solar substantially more expensive than nuclear for providing zero emission electricity 24/7 365 days a year. There is no issue with a modest contribution from solar. Once it rises above 20% the absence of storage creates serious grid instability. To deal with 24 out fluctuation backup power is needed, mainly gas. This adds to the cost of solar, as one needs duplicate power systems which are used at different time. Also relying on gas makes decarbonisation far more difficult. The problem with seasonal storage is unsolved but many hope hydrogen will achieve this. we shall see.
Also it seems pretty paradoxical if cars are going to move to heavily or even majority electric that storage would be a massive problem. Electric cars have to store electricity AND be light enough to work on the road. For purposes of the grid, you don't need to constantly move the battery around so weight and even size become much less of a problem.
It feels like this cost is artificially high by setting a hypothetical constraint like 'only solar' to the mix and again is 'grid instability' perhaps being caused by us not being open to making a more flexible grid?
I hear you. The cost and public preference issues are pretty big bottlenecks for nuclear. I don't have all the answers to these issues. I think it's worth mentioning that the most compelling case for more nuclear isn't economic, it's environmental. Nuclear takes up hundreds of times less space than wind and solar, so there's no need to destroy a whole desert ecosystem or disrupt endangered migratory bird flight patterns to produce energy at scale. Solar also has a pretty huge toxic waste issue that, unlike nuclear waste, is externalized.
Just so you know I'm not against nuclear. I think it would be amazing to pair a nuclear plant with an always on desalination plant or carbon sink. I'm just saying that solar's massive cost drop has changed the game in a way that it wouldn't have changed if prices didn't move much from the 1980's.
IMO these are weak arguments against solar/wind. Solar's waste issue could even be larger than nuclear's but nuclear's is more stubborn. Accidents at nuclear plants are low probability events with massive consquences and while that can be reduced by making nuclear plants smaller and more modular, that also makes them less efficient. Does anyone have a single example of a bird species that went extinct due to wind farms?
A very good video, I will have to look at this much more. His focus, however, is heavy on solar farms in the desert and large wind farms. Adding solar to almost all roofs, though, would avoid lighting birds on fire. The disassembly of used panels is an issue but so is all the electronics we use everyday. In truth is iPhones for 10B people to carry around forever not a more serious disposal issue than solar panels even if they were put on almost all roofs?
Decentralized storage likewise is a more viable scheme than centralized batteries IMO. Again a grid structured from the top down rather than an ebay like market matching producers and buyers I suspect is an issue here. Athough I'm not an engineer so my capacity may have been passed a while ago.
Just a quibble: Hurricanes are not a great poster child for climate change.
IPCC:
On tropical cyclone frequency, the IPCC says it is likely that “the global frequency of TCs over all categories will decrease or remain unchanged”. The bulk of the reduction is “at the weaker end of the intensity spectrum as the climate warms”, the report notes, while “the frequency of category 4-5 TCs will increase in limited regions over the western North Pacific”.
Message seems fine but don't ask us to have kids. Let's admit that it's just based on some weird desire to continue to outpace china's demographic age gap and bolster american production. And for the record, most people are not having kids because their financial and social future is unstable, not necessarily because of the climate.
You might say we will need more and more people to help solve climate change, because maintaining a steady productive economy is necessary to build and maintain green infrastructure. I disagree, I tend to think we have enough people and that they just need to be shifted around. The inefficiency of this economy has put millions of people into pointless jobs, and it is that inefficiency itself which is one of the causes of climate change, so naturally you solve two problems at once by taking people out of jobs which produce unnecessary emissions, and putting them into green jobs. Making more kids, of which 90% will land up in those stupid jobs, is not a reasonable request.
And no, your kid is not going to be the next Von Neumann who creates a perpetual motion machine.
Super cool that we'll have ecologically friendly cement when we're paying another half trillion to rebuild Houston for the 5th time in 2060 after super hurricane tau. Or solar cells that'll charge your phone in the permanent smoke cover from the wildfires burning in the rockies year round.
Green overconsumption is still overconsumption. But really I think you haven't thought through the political problems as well as the economic ones. Markets may save us from fossil fuels, but what are we going to do with domestic refugees in the millions from Lake Mead and reservoirs giving up the ghost? Fires threatening LA. Storms surging over the gulf and up the east coast? Food scarcity after crop failures (like india right now). Based on our COVID response there's no reason to be optimistic.
i have to sadly agree. food scarcity and ecological destabilization might be the biggest problem on the horizon. we might be able to grow nutritional "food" in labs now, sure, but you can't feed the whole world that way. If the insect population continues to rapidly decline, and pollinators can't do their job, the top of the 1% are gonna be the only ones getting fed. not to mention the erratic weather patterns which are becoming the norm, making traditional agriculture a thing of the past.
the covid response really illuminated how toxic our society is, and as long people continue to be manipulated into division, I can't subscribe to optimism.
That's one method. But yeah we'd have to keep it up until we've removed enough greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to bring things back to a tolerable level. :/
(Methane, at least, breaks down in the atmosphere fairly quickly, but direct air capture of CO2 is an expensive pain in the ass.)
"Things like ending capitalism become unnecessary". Except that climate change mitigation activists are left-wing, and anti-capitalism is intrinsic to their (our) worldview. We would still want to end capitalism even without the climate crisis, but the two aspects dovetail; the climate change issue gives anti-capitalism a sense of existential urgency, but wealth inequality does as well. And the pro-fossil fuel right-wing has already been convinced that climate change mitigation is just a stalking horse for the growth of government and anti-capitalism.
That's what the watermelon meme is about.
We're already there, already in that conflict. Be pessimistic about the world going over an increase of 2C, and be pessimistic, as most apolitical Americans tend to be, about there being no ideological conflict about what climate change requires from our society.
Or you could switch to liking political conflict, in which case you would be optimistic. :D
But most people aren't die hard left wing or right wing. They're more interested in their own lives and their own finances than the nation. So I see no reason that most of society can't embrace green capitalism that is cheaper than carbon capitalism, whatever the wishes of the radicals on either the side.
If some people are experiencing hysteria and existential dread that sounds more like mass psychosis than rational concern to me. I know climate change is bad and all but I'm sure we'll sort it out
I think you need to retain a little uncertainty. I think it's _very likely_ we'll sort it out -- but I work for one of the companies that's involved in engineering the progress Noah's pointing to here. The progress is happening because millions and millions of people are plugging away at the problem. I think we'll sort it out _if enough of us choose to make that happen_. That doesn't have to be 100%, it's not a prisoner's dilemma problem where any single defection can ruin the whole thing. But it absolutely is something you should worry about, and find a way to participate in. (And that's an incredibly broad range. Social activism that helps ameliorate poverty for communities that currently are too desperate about their immediate circumstances to care about climate change is relevant. So is work on protecting voting rights, to prevent America from going the way of Hungary and falling under the despotic control of lunatics who refuse to believe climate is an issue.)
Reading this was a great way to start my morning. I'm inherently an optimist and a technical optimist in particular. Giving me grounds for optimism is a service that I value.
There's an earlier version of this wonderful phrase than Gramsci's, actually, by Romain Rolland in his review of Raymond Lefèbre’s novel ‘Le sacrifice d’Abraham’:
Pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will
So, uh, why did you slice up and reformat that WaPo opinion poll? Why did you not just link to the primary source and screenshot the actual presentation of the actual poll conducted and laid out by WaPo?
If you follow your link to a twitter person discussing the pol, then follow HER link to the actual poll you're talking about, you see it's not formatted the way you post it, with the 'support' column entirely excised with only 'oppose' left. Given that your version is a basic matplotlib barplot with all the default formatting options, it's not a presentation issue.
Anyway, it seems like an overwhelming 80% or so of Americans would gladly see a tax on the wealthy - who have something like 50-95% of the, you know, WEALTH, needed to pay for these programs - to make this happen. If I were given a poll and asked 'Would you like a billionaire to pay 10 million for this program or would you rather we raise a million poor people's utility bill, I would certainly be opposed as well.
Pretty catastrophic attempt at making your case, so don't sweat it I guess.
My "This is a big important issue we should spend a lot of time and energy on" position ends up practically seeming like climate change denial to some activists because it comes with the caveat "this isn't literally the end of the world." None of the worst case 2100 scenarios are anything that would cause the collapse of society, much less human extinction.
I agree 100% with the spirit of the article but I would argue that (1) there are even stronger grounds for optimism than you make in the article and (2) some of the obstacles to reducing emissions fast and coping with climate change come from an unexpected source - environmentalists. Regarding one, if you read the recent IPCC report what is striking is how the 'most likely' trajectory of emissions and climate change has improved substantially compared with previous reports. This trajectory (average global warming of 2-3 C above current temperatures and sea level increases of ~50 cm) will be unpleasant (very for some) and require adaptation but there is no plausible mechanism by which it will pose an existential threat to humanity or cause mass extinction. Regarding (2) while the reduction in price of renewables and potential advances in storage (hydrogen and iron batteries) have finally made intermittent renewable energy a plausible route for emissions reductions it is likely that emissions will go down faster if we embrace other technology, especially nuclear power and CCS. Our ability to adapt to changes in precipitation and temperature will be hastened by exploitation of modern GM technology. Unfortunately there is very strong opposition to both nuclear power and modern GM technology, especially in Europe. When you combine this with the understandably strong resistance in high population-density countries to the vast installations required for solar, wind and their connecting transmission lines you can see that environmentalist could effectively block the required transition. In many cases they would be happy with this as the more radical ones favour degrowth and population reduction as a strategy.
"Climate change is beatable. We can even make money while beating it!" .....
..though not likely in a market economy where 'renewables plus storage' remain more expensive than coal. And as you say, even when renewables plus storage ARE cheaper, the profit-driven fossil industry won't just say "oh well time's up, let's just close shop...." ...profits before people, remember.
At Davos last year, the BIS said: "central banks** might have to buy the fossil industry".
Indeed. We can be sure them fossil industries ain't gonna go quietly.....
**authorized to issue debt-free money, or rather create money 'ex nihilo', to fund the transition in all nations, in order to avoid price rises for electricity consumers, and ultimately reduce them to near zero (with maintenance of green infrastructure the only expense).
Thank you for the note of optimism, I needed it ... Perhaps Americans need to relate more clearly the devastations of the climatic disasters that they suffer periodically with their last causes, and understand that they will probably increase in the future
Another huge reason for Climate optimism is nuclear power! Public opinion on nuclear power is much more favorable than it was a generation ago (although it isn't where it needs to be) and advances in waste storage and small modular reactors make me optimistic about nuclear's role in the global energy transition. I'd love to read your thoughts on nuclear.
I'm generally favorable to nuclear as well however I feel like a lot of people formed their opinions on nuclear 20, 30 or more years ago. Since then solar/wind has dropped 90% in costs. Nuclear for all its merits will never drop 90% barring a 'Mr. Fusion' level discovery. Even if all NIMBYism and supposedly hostile regulations were dropped, you can't drop the cost of a large plant that much.
I feel then that many nuclear advocates need to rethink their views on nuclear, not to reject them but to recognize the shift. Let's consider the 1980/90s when moving printed stuff back and forth was very important (i.e. mail, books, magazines). Yes fax machines did exist but they only applied documents a few pages long. The approaching future world was going to drop costs of text by 90%+. What happened? Today we still have the mail, printed magazines and newspapers. But it is not the same, the ability to digitally move texts around almost for free has shaken up all those industries....I think Newsweek is not even available anymore as a print magazine.
Nuclear advocates should consider the world they are advocating is going to have to shift quite a bit that these sources dropped 90% versus a world where they did not move down much at all. I agree modular reactors are probably a good way to address that, esp. in cases where it is more important to get a lot of heat generated rather than electricity itself.
While installing solar and wind remains cheap, the costs of intermittency remain very high, and they increase exponentially as the proportion of the grid coming from solar/wind approaches 100%. Unless there is a huge breakthrough in storage technology reliable zero carbon sources such as nuclear or hydro will be essential for any electricity grid. Another issue with solar and wind is that there is very strong local opposition to their installation, a major issue in high density countries which do not have authoritarian governments.
OK but again costs have dropped 90% so even if you need to build out twice as much solar capacity it's not implausible.
Local opposition to wind has been a thing, although wind has grown. Opposition to solar is a bit silly unless you have places also opposed to roofs. Home battery systems like the Tesla Wall are also a thing making the grid more decentralized. Instead of one supplier selling power you have many small suppliers essentially selling power to each other and the grid becomes more like a Ebay.
A lot of opposition to solar/wind seems to really be opposition to anything that changes the grid itself, which I think probably should be challenged. Just like on Ebay, you can still have huge suppliers on the grid in a different world. Nuclear/hydro and other massive generators would still be around.
Even if solar cost nothing to install the cost of storage to cope with 24 hour and seasonal fluctuations is huge, if indeed it is even possible. This makes solar substantially more expensive than nuclear for providing zero emission electricity 24/7 365 days a year. There is no issue with a modest contribution from solar. Once it rises above 20% the absence of storage creates serious grid instability. To deal with 24 out fluctuation backup power is needed, mainly gas. This adds to the cost of solar, as one needs duplicate power systems which are used at different time. Also relying on gas makes decarbonisation far more difficult. The problem with seasonal storage is unsolved but many hope hydrogen will achieve this. we shall see.
Also it seems pretty paradoxical if cars are going to move to heavily or even majority electric that storage would be a massive problem. Electric cars have to store electricity AND be light enough to work on the road. For purposes of the grid, you don't need to constantly move the battery around so weight and even size become much less of a problem.
It feels like this cost is artificially high by setting a hypothetical constraint like 'only solar' to the mix and again is 'grid instability' perhaps being caused by us not being open to making a more flexible grid?
I hear you. The cost and public preference issues are pretty big bottlenecks for nuclear. I don't have all the answers to these issues. I think it's worth mentioning that the most compelling case for more nuclear isn't economic, it's environmental. Nuclear takes up hundreds of times less space than wind and solar, so there's no need to destroy a whole desert ecosystem or disrupt endangered migratory bird flight patterns to produce energy at scale. Solar also has a pretty huge toxic waste issue that, unlike nuclear waste, is externalized.
Just so you know I'm not against nuclear. I think it would be amazing to pair a nuclear plant with an always on desalination plant or carbon sink. I'm just saying that solar's massive cost drop has changed the game in a way that it wouldn't have changed if prices didn't move much from the 1980's.
IMO these are weak arguments against solar/wind. Solar's waste issue could even be larger than nuclear's but nuclear's is more stubborn. Accidents at nuclear plants are low probability events with massive consquences and while that can be reduced by making nuclear plants smaller and more modular, that also makes them less efficient. Does anyone have a single example of a bird species that went extinct due to wind farms?
Here's a more detailed look at the environmental issues of renewable energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w&ab_channel=TEDxTalks
A very good video, I will have to look at this much more. His focus, however, is heavy on solar farms in the desert and large wind farms. Adding solar to almost all roofs, though, would avoid lighting birds on fire. The disassembly of used panels is an issue but so is all the electronics we use everyday. In truth is iPhones for 10B people to carry around forever not a more serious disposal issue than solar panels even if they were put on almost all roofs?
Decentralized storage likewise is a more viable scheme than centralized batteries IMO. Again a grid structured from the top down rather than an ebay like market matching producers and buyers I suspect is an issue here. Athough I'm not an engineer so my capacity may have been passed a while ago.
Just a quibble: Hurricanes are not a great poster child for climate change.
IPCC:
On tropical cyclone frequency, the IPCC says it is likely that “the global frequency of TCs over all categories will decrease or remain unchanged”. The bulk of the reduction is “at the weaker end of the intensity spectrum as the climate warms”, the report notes, while “the frequency of category 4-5 TCs will increase in limited regions over the western North Pacific”.
Message seems fine but don't ask us to have kids. Let's admit that it's just based on some weird desire to continue to outpace china's demographic age gap and bolster american production. And for the record, most people are not having kids because their financial and social future is unstable, not necessarily because of the climate.
You might say we will need more and more people to help solve climate change, because maintaining a steady productive economy is necessary to build and maintain green infrastructure. I disagree, I tend to think we have enough people and that they just need to be shifted around. The inefficiency of this economy has put millions of people into pointless jobs, and it is that inefficiency itself which is one of the causes of climate change, so naturally you solve two problems at once by taking people out of jobs which produce unnecessary emissions, and putting them into green jobs. Making more kids, of which 90% will land up in those stupid jobs, is not a reasonable request.
And no, your kid is not going to be the next Von Neumann who creates a perpetual motion machine.
Super cool that we'll have ecologically friendly cement when we're paying another half trillion to rebuild Houston for the 5th time in 2060 after super hurricane tau. Or solar cells that'll charge your phone in the permanent smoke cover from the wildfires burning in the rockies year round.
Green overconsumption is still overconsumption. But really I think you haven't thought through the political problems as well as the economic ones. Markets may save us from fossil fuels, but what are we going to do with domestic refugees in the millions from Lake Mead and reservoirs giving up the ghost? Fires threatening LA. Storms surging over the gulf and up the east coast? Food scarcity after crop failures (like india right now). Based on our COVID response there's no reason to be optimistic.
Annihilate the pessimists.
i have to sadly agree. food scarcity and ecological destabilization might be the biggest problem on the horizon. we might be able to grow nutritional "food" in labs now, sure, but you can't feed the whole world that way. If the insect population continues to rapidly decline, and pollinators can't do their job, the top of the 1% are gonna be the only ones getting fed. not to mention the erratic weather patterns which are becoming the norm, making traditional agriculture a thing of the past.
the covid response really illuminated how toxic our society is, and as long people continue to be manipulated into division, I can't subscribe to optimism.
Well, there's always the word which must not be spoken...
GEOENGINEERING
AKA chucking as much sulfur into the sky as possible for the next 200 years cuz if we ever stop the effects will be drastic.
That's one method. But yeah we'd have to keep it up until we've removed enough greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to bring things back to a tolerable level. :/
(Methane, at least, breaks down in the atmosphere fairly quickly, but direct air capture of CO2 is an expensive pain in the ass.)
I criticized one of your recent articles so I feel like I should say I think this one is great
"Things like ending capitalism become unnecessary". Except that climate change mitigation activists are left-wing, and anti-capitalism is intrinsic to their (our) worldview. We would still want to end capitalism even without the climate crisis, but the two aspects dovetail; the climate change issue gives anti-capitalism a sense of existential urgency, but wealth inequality does as well. And the pro-fossil fuel right-wing has already been convinced that climate change mitigation is just a stalking horse for the growth of government and anti-capitalism.
That's what the watermelon meme is about.
We're already there, already in that conflict. Be pessimistic about the world going over an increase of 2C, and be pessimistic, as most apolitical Americans tend to be, about there being no ideological conflict about what climate change requires from our society.
Or you could switch to liking political conflict, in which case you would be optimistic. :D
But most people aren't die hard left wing or right wing. They're more interested in their own lives and their own finances than the nation. So I see no reason that most of society can't embrace green capitalism that is cheaper than carbon capitalism, whatever the wishes of the radicals on either the side.
If some people are experiencing hysteria and existential dread that sounds more like mass psychosis than rational concern to me. I know climate change is bad and all but I'm sure we'll sort it out
I think you need to retain a little uncertainty. I think it's _very likely_ we'll sort it out -- but I work for one of the companies that's involved in engineering the progress Noah's pointing to here. The progress is happening because millions and millions of people are plugging away at the problem. I think we'll sort it out _if enough of us choose to make that happen_. That doesn't have to be 100%, it's not a prisoner's dilemma problem where any single defection can ruin the whole thing. But it absolutely is something you should worry about, and find a way to participate in. (And that's an incredibly broad range. Social activism that helps ameliorate poverty for communities that currently are too desperate about their immediate circumstances to care about climate change is relevant. So is work on protecting voting rights, to prevent America from going the way of Hungary and falling under the despotic control of lunatics who refuse to believe climate is an issue.)
Reading this was a great way to start my morning. I'm inherently an optimist and a technical optimist in particular. Giving me grounds for optimism is a service that I value.
One could mention that "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" is a line of Antonio Gramsci.
There's an earlier version of this wonderful phrase than Gramsci's, actually, by Romain Rolland in his review of Raymond Lefèbre’s novel ‘Le sacrifice d’Abraham’:
Pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will
So, uh, why did you slice up and reformat that WaPo opinion poll? Why did you not just link to the primary source and screenshot the actual presentation of the actual poll conducted and laid out by WaPo?
If you follow your link to a twitter person discussing the pol, then follow HER link to the actual poll you're talking about, you see it's not formatted the way you post it, with the 'support' column entirely excised with only 'oppose' left. Given that your version is a basic matplotlib barplot with all the default formatting options, it's not a presentation issue.
Anyway, it seems like an overwhelming 80% or so of Americans would gladly see a tax on the wealthy - who have something like 50-95% of the, you know, WEALTH, needed to pay for these programs - to make this happen. If I were given a poll and asked 'Would you like a billionaire to pay 10 million for this program or would you rather we raise a million poor people's utility bill, I would certainly be opposed as well.
Pretty catastrophic attempt at making your case, so don't sweat it I guess.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/L64F6CWWQUI6TCJEDW35VR4X7M.jpg&w=916
For anyone interested in what he is actually talking about in his links.
My "This is a big important issue we should spend a lot of time and energy on" position ends up practically seeming like climate change denial to some activists because it comes with the caveat "this isn't literally the end of the world." None of the worst case 2100 scenarios are anything that would cause the collapse of society, much less human extinction.
I agree 100% with the spirit of the article but I would argue that (1) there are even stronger grounds for optimism than you make in the article and (2) some of the obstacles to reducing emissions fast and coping with climate change come from an unexpected source - environmentalists. Regarding one, if you read the recent IPCC report what is striking is how the 'most likely' trajectory of emissions and climate change has improved substantially compared with previous reports. This trajectory (average global warming of 2-3 C above current temperatures and sea level increases of ~50 cm) will be unpleasant (very for some) and require adaptation but there is no plausible mechanism by which it will pose an existential threat to humanity or cause mass extinction. Regarding (2) while the reduction in price of renewables and potential advances in storage (hydrogen and iron batteries) have finally made intermittent renewable energy a plausible route for emissions reductions it is likely that emissions will go down faster if we embrace other technology, especially nuclear power and CCS. Our ability to adapt to changes in precipitation and temperature will be hastened by exploitation of modern GM technology. Unfortunately there is very strong opposition to both nuclear power and modern GM technology, especially in Europe. When you combine this with the understandably strong resistance in high population-density countries to the vast installations required for solar, wind and their connecting transmission lines you can see that environmentalist could effectively block the required transition. In many cases they would be happy with this as the more radical ones favour degrowth and population reduction as a strategy.
I think you overestimate the lobbies. No industry can survive when it's competitors are cheaper, cleaner, and newer.
People might not be willing to pay 10 bucks to avoid climate change, but similarly they are also not willing to pay 10 bucks to keep oil or gas alive.
Coal was dead and decaying before people even really noticed. Oil and gas are on the same path.