I would say that the transition we are currently witnessing is real action: while the pandemic made it difficult to be certain, the extremely rapid growth of renewables — even though electricity is far from the only concern — seems to have resulted in emissions either peaking or being very close to peaking.
I'm not sure if we really could have gone much faster. 20 years ago I would have bet on nuclear energy and hydrogen cars, not because they were cheap, but because nuclear was already at the right scale and hydrogen can obviously be scaled up quickly whenever the energy is cheap. Instead, we got PV so cheap I'm planning on getting a balcony system with a pay-back period of less than a year because it makes sense to get that immediately while my partner and I plan how to do a full-power system, and batteries are so cheap they're not only used in cars but also for grid power time shifting.
But to expand on what I said before, electricity is far from the only concern: we need to reduce emissions by 99.9% to be sustainable. If you look at this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector, the remaining 0.1% is the smallest line in the pie chart — "grassland". Switching all road transport to electric helps a lot (11.9%), it's not something to be dismissed simply because other things also need to be fixed.
I would say that the transition we are currently witnessing is real action: while the pandemic made it difficult to be certain, the extremely rapid growth of renewables — even though electricity is far from the only concern — seems to have resulted in emissions either peaking or being very close to peaking.
I'm not sure if we really could have gone much faster. 20 years ago I would have bet on nuclear energy and hydrogen cars, not because they were cheap, but because nuclear was already at the right scale and hydrogen can obviously be scaled up quickly whenever the energy is cheap. Instead, we got PV so cheap I'm planning on getting a balcony system with a pay-back period of less than a year because it makes sense to get that immediately while my partner and I plan how to do a full-power system, and batteries are so cheap they're not only used in cars but also for grid power time shifting.
But to expand on what I said before, electricity is far from the only concern: we need to reduce emissions by 99.9% to be sustainable. If you look at this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector, the remaining 0.1% is the smallest line in the pie chart — "grassland". Switching all road transport to electric helps a lot (11.9%), it's not something to be dismissed simply because other things also need to be fixed.