"That goes back to my original point – the trick isn’t getting new tech, the trick is getting people to use the cleaner tech we already have en masse."

True enough. I’ve been watching some presentations from "the other side" in order to get a handle on what exactly the holdup is. One of the most revealing would be this one, issued by the oil company BP;

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/06/16/bps-somber-review-warns-of-an-unsustainable-path/#1056fd1ee3d4

Although the statistics are presented in dry tone and words like "2018 gas bonanza" are used, it does paint an alarming picture where the main reason we’re having trouble isn’t that renewables aren’t growing fast enough.
Renewables are expanding explosively. But the increase in energy demand is outpacing the supply which has rendered coal the second fastest growing contributor to the power sector.

In short, people DO use cleaner tech – but they also use vastly larger amounts of power each year which means the clean tech expansion can’t keep up. The sole actor capable of instant stop-gap kWh gratification? Coal. The main usage of that increased power demand according to BP’s statistics? Dealing with extra hot/cold weather.

It’s one thing to get bad news from the IPCC but when a major oil company presents the same it’s time to start reading the writing on the wall.

From what I can see what we’ll need now isn’t cleaner tech. We aren’t going to push that rollout significantly faster than we already do. Massive active atmospheric scrubbing, carbon capture technologies deployed in massive scale, and, most importantly, reducing the demand on the power sector. That’s what will be necessary.

Unfortunately all of those extremely necessary steps are also extremely expensive, and rely heavily not only on the corporate sector accepting serious chunks taken out of their GM’s, but also on every citizen using less electricity to power AC’s, dehumidifiers, or heating in summer and winter.

"Yes, and the reaction to that should be to do our damn best to ease as much pain as possible in the future even if we can’t hit the original targets, not to throw our hands up and give up because we won’t get everything."

Concur completely.

But i think we need to realize that we’re at the point where we need to be very careful to set targets we can reasonably reach if we are to get anything at all. When even oil companies and major US industries decide to commit to eating losses over climate change in spite of anything the screaming orange says…that’s a positive sign. Also one which is alarming because it means things have gone THAT far.

New tech won’t cut it, nor will increased deployment of carbon capture technology at scale. We literally don’t have the time to roll it out for it to be effective.

What we need is to shrink the power sector. Cut power expenditure. And unfortunately that’s a tough goal since for the most part the increases in expenditure in recent years aren’t due to technology which can be made that much more efficient because physics.

I don’t think even flattening the curve on global warming will be possible unless we start by forcefully rationing the power usable by households and industries. That…will lead to pretty harsh consequences, even if the political will to do so magically appears.