While I agree that political change is necessary for a host of reasons, and that the current global system (more specifically the late-stage-capitalist US-hegemony financial world order with almost no democratic controls left) is pretty ill-suited to the task of fixing climate change... I think it's probably all we've got for this one in the timespan necessary.
Either the pain will reach deep enough into the system to affect the pride of the few remaining people who still have levers of control which can amount to more than "money go up", or the very mechanisms of capital will be affected "money not going up anymore. guess we gotta fix the planet", or it will all fail spectacularly and those in power will use the new climate conditions as a perpetual planned obsolescence to profit off increased costs of living worldwide for however long that lasts before a war breaks out and ends it all.
Either way, these decisions are probably out of the hands of the vast majority of people, ourselves included (unless you have a staggeringly rich uncle).
The mechanisms I see we have available, in this obscure niche forum for engineers, are to reduce the pricetag of climate action to levels where it makes capital sense. At $100/ton it's a ceiling of $3 Trillion to suck up 100% of the world's CO2 each year. Adjust to more reasonable targets as needed. Now... comparing that to bailouts of the past and considering we can likely get that pricepoint much lower at scale (or even profitable, with e.g. a self-perpetuating kelp farm harvested for fuel/plastic) that really doesn't seem like that much. The mass manufacturing and/or geoengineering to actually implement such projects seems daunting and risky in new ways, but the financials aren't all that bad. Someone just has to pony up. And imo the current situation is simply a political/financial game of hot potato where every faction wants to push the problem down the line for someone else to handle until the absolute last minute - even as solar and tech improvements are making potential solutions that much more achievable (which again motivates the delays).
Even now, with just current solar panel technology, the sheer investment value in just buying some panels and having them pay for themselves in a couple years is going to motivate most of the change needed. Obviously there are still a lot of industries that cant use that immediately, and a lot who are motivated to protect their sunk cost investments (anyone with an oil portfolio - aka most of the decision makers) - but still, capital is gonna react to this all. Just likely too slowly...
The most likely scenario I see where climate change gets solved by the current system (of the shrinking set of scenarios where it's solved at all) is where governments (and their financial backers) consort to fund some mega projects for mass CO2 drawdown. This results in a lot of money somehow flowing to oil and gas people (buyouts to pay them not to interfere), and increased power concentration in the US hegemonic global state - though possibly with a new negotiated balance between its participants. They implement these projects using some wartime-style measures of mass manufacturing and pseudo-command-economies to start up the project (WWII production would be easily capable of this - govs can do quite a lot when they actually try, and print debt/money to fund it). Once it's mostly built and derisked, sucking down CO2 successfully, the project will probably be privatized to some megacorp which charges a perpetual fee to taxpayers and is owned by the backroom financiers/political authors of this project. It will become a hated entity in the future like Nestle or Facebook, but it will also at least mostly mitigate extreme climate problems - probably artificially keeping things at a soft boil perpetually to ensure it gets paid. The profits of such a corp will not flow to the people whatsoever though, naturally. It will cause new "unforseen" environmental and social problems probably, but these will be debated ad-nauseum on talk shows whether they're worse than climate change. The project's true cost and effectiveness will be heavily distorted by the sheer amount of greased hands in its overall construction and operation. Though its creators will at least have had the prescience to make sure it sucks down enough carbon to reduce global measurements by a reasonable amount each year - or they'll monopolize the measuring agencies.
Either the pain will reach deep enough into the system to affect the pride of the few remaining people who still have levers of control which can amount to more than "money go up", or the very mechanisms of capital will be affected "money not going up anymore. guess we gotta fix the planet", or it will all fail spectacularly and those in power will use the new climate conditions as a perpetual planned obsolescence to profit off increased costs of living worldwide for however long that lasts before a war breaks out and ends it all.
Either way, these decisions are probably out of the hands of the vast majority of people, ourselves included (unless you have a staggeringly rich uncle).
The mechanisms I see we have available, in this obscure niche forum for engineers, are to reduce the pricetag of climate action to levels where it makes capital sense. At $100/ton it's a ceiling of $3 Trillion to suck up 100% of the world's CO2 each year. Adjust to more reasonable targets as needed. Now... comparing that to bailouts of the past and considering we can likely get that pricepoint much lower at scale (or even profitable, with e.g. a self-perpetuating kelp farm harvested for fuel/plastic) that really doesn't seem like that much. The mass manufacturing and/or geoengineering to actually implement such projects seems daunting and risky in new ways, but the financials aren't all that bad. Someone just has to pony up. And imo the current situation is simply a political/financial game of hot potato where every faction wants to push the problem down the line for someone else to handle until the absolute last minute - even as solar and tech improvements are making potential solutions that much more achievable (which again motivates the delays).
Even now, with just current solar panel technology, the sheer investment value in just buying some panels and having them pay for themselves in a couple years is going to motivate most of the change needed. Obviously there are still a lot of industries that cant use that immediately, and a lot who are motivated to protect their sunk cost investments (anyone with an oil portfolio - aka most of the decision makers) - but still, capital is gonna react to this all. Just likely too slowly...
The most likely scenario I see where climate change gets solved by the current system (of the shrinking set of scenarios where it's solved at all) is where governments (and their financial backers) consort to fund some mega projects for mass CO2 drawdown. This results in a lot of money somehow flowing to oil and gas people (buyouts to pay them not to interfere), and increased power concentration in the US hegemonic global state - though possibly with a new negotiated balance between its participants. They implement these projects using some wartime-style measures of mass manufacturing and pseudo-command-economies to start up the project (WWII production would be easily capable of this - govs can do quite a lot when they actually try, and print debt/money to fund it). Once it's mostly built and derisked, sucking down CO2 successfully, the project will probably be privatized to some megacorp which charges a perpetual fee to taxpayers and is owned by the backroom financiers/political authors of this project. It will become a hated entity in the future like Nestle or Facebook, but it will also at least mostly mitigate extreme climate problems - probably artificially keeping things at a soft boil perpetually to ensure it gets paid. The profits of such a corp will not flow to the people whatsoever though, naturally. It will cause new "unforseen" environmental and social problems probably, but these will be debated ad-nauseum on talk shows whether they're worse than climate change. The project's true cost and effectiveness will be heavily distorted by the sheer amount of greased hands in its overall construction and operation. Though its creators will at least have had the prescience to make sure it sucks down enough carbon to reduce global measurements by a reasonable amount each year - or they'll monopolize the measuring agencies.