Sure, you can slowly switch out old production for new cleaner sources of energy. The fastest way to reduce carbon footprints (and cheapest) is to reduce demand.
Growing consumer awareness over their over-consumption, to change their behaviour, is one of the most powerful and direct solutions we have.
Actually, that has been shown time and time again to be false. Asking consumers to change their behavior to lower energy consumption is about as effective as telling people to diet and exercise to lose weight: it may work on an individual level, but it is a complete failure at a societal level, and when it comes to decarbonizing the economy, the societal level is all that matters.
If we want to lower people's energy consumption, we need to make policy and economic changes, e.g. raising the cost of certain types of energy use so that it causes people to reconsider their use of it, or redesigning spaces so that less energy use is needed (e.g. making public transportation, or human-powered transportation, a more viable alternative to driving).
But I agree it's very misguided if it gets turned into strict quota system that everyone is locked into. We don't want to turn civilization a zero sum game.
Reducing consumption is a huge part of the solution, especially because it makes the extremely hard energy storage problem way more tractable.
This is already happening with desalination and hydrogen production via electrolysis, and hydrocarbon production (for carbon-neutral transport fuel) is being piloted too. Future likely applications include electrolytic refining of iron ore to the metal. Cheap electricity is going to enable new industries we haven't thought of yet.
"P2X" is the abbreviation to look out for.