Going after carbon emissions by focusing on heavy hitters, like coal, energy production alternatives looks to me like an approach, however necessary in the long term (50 years), is also the most difficult, expensive, and slowest path possible. It has also proven to have the greatest resistance to date. Meanwhile, the permafrost is melting towards the tipping point 20 years, probably fewer, from now, and that problem is a ticking time bomb with a sensitive fuse.
A CLASSIC capitalist enterprise problem-solving business strategy recommended to business leaders everywhere is to go for the short term "easy" fixes first, in other words the least cost highest payoff solution that can be achieved in the shortest time possible. In shorthand, slow down the momentum first.
That means the most important question we have to ask, what can we do NOW to pull the emergency brake and get faster results?
A promising technology that isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves has to do with addressing changes to what is called the "permaculture." In short, that means slowing down "dessertification" or getting grasslands to return or become more robust in areas where they used to thrive. Our former grasslands are a case in point, and the problem replicates across just about every continent on earth.
There are techniques which have the capacity to restore grasslands, if approached aggressively, in as little as 4 years.
See Geof Lawson's activities in Jordan:
http://permaculturenews.org/2014/02/01/desert-oasis-4-years-jordan/
Even more remarkable is how quickly massive change can be introduced by turning the world's livestock operations away from penned up inhumane stockades to pasture in wide open grasslands:
1. Grasslands increase oxygen production and captures carbon.
2. Grazing animals removes concentrated animal waste from water supplies and adds value to the grasslands and the carbon waste goes into the ground.
3. Production and consumption of commercial feeds is a high energy consumption, carbon generating enterprise that relies on vulnerable mega crop plantations of corn and soy. So risk to food production systems is also reduced.
4. Meat production as it is currently practiced has an enormous carbon footprint. Turning to restoring grasslands with livestock grazing reverses this contributor past carbon neutral in to significant net reduction in carbon production.
For more on this, see Alan Savory's short TED talk, an incredibly compelling, science based solution that brings what we need NOW, a fast, easy, and cheap application of brakes to CO2 generation. It will not precipitate a catastrophic short term global financial crisis that is at the root of corporate resistance to massive change to energy production infrastructure; it also does not take anything close to the associated mind-boggling financial cost of that change.
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change#t-138051
