Bring my hopes up about climate change.

I think there's very little chance without breakthrough technology, but I'm optimistic about breakthrough technology.

Without breakthrough technology we'd need a fairly high, worldwide price on carbon, and a fast rollout of advanced fission (e.g. molten salt reactors) in addition to renewables. We're not getting the carbon price anytime soon and regulators are mostly preventing progress on advanced reactors, which would take decades to roll out anyway.

People are really hopeful about wind/solar because they extrapolate exponential curves forever, but it doesn't really work like that; lots of things look exponential at low adoption levels, but it really turns out to be an S-curve.

What we really need is an energy source that produces energy on demand which is so cheap that it costs less in total than the cost of fuel for power plants, so it makes sense to replace even a brand-new coal plant.

Some of the private nuclear fusion projects, using aneutronic fuels, could actually achieve that. Tri Alpha in particular is looking promising. And they don't have any significant problems with regulators, because fusion is so much more safer by nature than fission.

Other things that could help: researchers at MIT seem to have just figured out a practical lithium-air battery that would bring the range of electric cars up to gasoline-car levels. Various people are working on ways of making carbon-neutral liquid fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere. With cheap clean energy we could desalinate seawater and green the Sahara, drawing down massive amounts of CO2.

We're basically in a race between advancing technology, and catastrophic climate change that puts an end to technological civilization. We have to work fast, because as climate impacts get more expensive, we'll have less resources for advancing tech.

/r/Futurology Thread