I'm trying to find a good way to articulate how stupid and dangerous this attitude is that you see from enlightened centrists - that climate change is real, but we don't have to do anything drastic (i.e. costly) this moment because we'll "innovate our way out of it" because "we've always done it."
This can sound true-ish because of past existential crises that were resolved through technological innovations, for example, World War II and the Space Race. But what is missing is the urgency that's actually needed to do anything meaningful. It's like if FDR said "we need to defeat the Nazis but that costs too much, here's my plan for defeating half of the Nazis over the next 50 years" or if JFK said "we're going to put a man on the moon by 2010".
Also, since an actual solution would require a great deal of global cooperation and coordination, I don't think there's any scenario where the US is capable of addressing climate change in any meaningful way.
The way I've talked about it with centrist friends before is: it's not about the technology (which we already have) is about funding and politics.
In the simplest example, imagine we invented a machine that removed CO2 from the air (trees but anyway), it's still going to take a lot of money/energy to build and run. How does this deal with the prisoner's dilemma we already have, where each country is motivated to invest the least possible in this tech, and rely on other countries to do the actual work of carbon capture? How do we organise ourselves to pay to run these machines when there's no direct return on investment?
The main problem is our entire society is based on extraction -> use -> discard, primarily of fossil fuels. To avoid complete environmental collapse we have to rebuild the entire foundations of society to something circular and no growth (actually de-growth), with the natural world considered part of us rather than a resource to be plundered.