I think us people do not have the capacity as societies to effectively anticipate and solve problems that we can see approaching but have not become catastrophic yet. We always act shortsightedly and ..hope for the best. Most of the people will just not vote/support anything that might bring them some minuscule pain. Even if we know by logic that the problem is coming, we tend to follow whomever will tell us that it's not a problem and base our hopes on him/her. Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.

It is very hopeful that renewables are being pursued and developed by China at least to some degree and have become economically attractive. That's the only feasible way to minimize the damage that's already been done.

> Think of a problem that we saw coming in the future and we collectively solved. I can think of none.

My favorite counterexample is the ozone layer. When I was a kid, that was the Big Bad environmental concern. But we actually worked together on a global scale to fix it.

Broader climate change is a much bigger problem with stronger financial and political incentives, but in principle we've done it before.

It's not even at society scale IMO. How many times do people at a company deprioritize small-to-medium fixes on things that may/will become a problem later? Sometimes you have to wait until a problem gets "big enough" before you can get buy-in from colleagues to address it.

Of course details matter and what I mentioned above is not a universal truth. It is an often observed pattern though.