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.
I think people misunderstand the scale of the problem. I like to talk about it this way: think about the size and scale of the fossil fuel industry. For the last ~150 years, we've devoted a tremendous amount of resources to digging up, processing, and burning coal, oil, and natural gas. Exactly why we were dong that isn't important for the moment--just pay attention to the size of the industry. All the mines, all the oil platforms, all the refineries, all the fracking: all that operating seven days a week, 365 days a year for over a century, backed by probably the wealthiest industry the world has ever seen. We've spent trillions of dollars figuring out the best, fastest, cheapest, most efficient way to extract carbon from the ground and pump it into the air. We've built our entire global economy around doing that: it facilitates everything from schoolteachers to Supreme Court justices. It's very, very important to us, and we've poured a mind-boggling amount of resources into getting very, very good at doing it. And, again, we've been at this for well over a century.
Now, if you're claiming that some novel technology is going to come along and fix this problem, think about what that would actually entail. If we want to, say, remove carbon from the air and resequester it underground, we need something that operates on at least the scale of the fossil fuel industry, only going in reverse. We need to get just as good at taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, turning it into carbon, and putting that carbon somewhere it can't get out as we are at doing the opposite. We need an industrial complex on the scale of all the oil refineries, drilling platforms, coal mines, and tar sands operations everywhere in the world, but doing something completely different and completely new. We need the mirror image of the fossil fuel industry. Really take a second to sit and think about the scale of that.
But that's not all. The fossil fuel industry had over a century to ramp up to where it is right now; we don't have that luxury. We need to go from full speed ahead--extracting and burning more fossil fuels every year--to full reverse--taking at least that amount of carbon out of the air and putting it back in the ground--over the course of years, not decades or centuries. We need to entirely reverse-engineer the complete fossil fuel industry, start running it backward, and do both of those things while also decreasing the amount of fossil fuels we're using across the board. And we need to do it about ten times faster than we were able to get the fossil fuel industry up and running.
Now, what's your proposal for how Elon Musk is going to solve that?
Trust the plan.