Do people really believe we can innovate our way through climate change?
As an employee at a climate tech company, I think the primary roadblock is simply investing resources (money and time) in the various solutions available to us. A ton of innovation is happening along the way (e.g. first ever net positive fusion ignition yesterday) but even without much innovation, we could solve the problems by directing our resources at them.
In other words, I think climate change is very solvable and that innovation along the way is constant and inevitable. I'm not saying that we will definitely make the necessary investments to succeed, which I think might be your point? But as this post demonstrates, the rate of investment is improving significantly.
In any case, I’m always skeptical of “we can’t do X without doing Y” arguments because they’re usually about making the perfect the enemy of the good rather than X actually being precluded by not having Y.
You can't heat your home with public policy
There's still some politicss to overcome, but if the cheapest source of energy is low carbon then the problem is mostly solved in the big picture. As long as we don't hit too many tipping points we should be okay.
While low carbon electricity might be the cheapest source of energy on spot markets, that's a really tiny part of the picture. We still need to figure out large scale storage and electrify everything, those aren't solved problems.
But let's assume we solve them. Do we have enough metallic resources on Earth that we can extract cheaply? Do we have enough cheap fossil fuels left to actually do that?
Historically there's no energy transition:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
New sources of energy have made the world consume more of the old ones, not less. Same thing with technological innovation and gains in energy efficiency.