“The sheer scale of the task, I pointed out to Kathleen, is why we’d barely made a dent in reducing global emissions despite three decades of effort and concern.”
(Yes, and also the decades of deception, denial, and delay, led by fossil fuel rentiers and the political systems they’ve essentially bought to subsidize and reinforce their power.)
“I am an engineer. I’ve been trained to solve problems. And I’ve spent more than a decade thinking about the climate problem.”
(Ah, okay. Could it be that assuming energy transition is solely or even mainly an engineering problem is an obstacle here? It is absolutely a cultural, social, and political problem - we’re dealing with disagreements about what constitutes a good life, the relative value of current and future lives and quality of life, and the relative value of the planetary biosphere in relation to humanity. None of those are remotely so narrow and simple as “engineering problems”)