I'm trying to find a good way to articulate how stupid and dangerous this attitude is that you see from enlightened centrists - that climate change is real, but we don't have to do anything drastic (i.e. costly) this moment because we'll "innovate our way out of it" because "we've always done it."
This can sound true-ish because of past existential crises that were resolved through technological innovations, for example, World War II and the Space Race. But what is missing is the urgency that's actually needed to do anything meaningful. It's like if FDR said "we need to defeat the Nazis but that costs too much, here's my plan for defeating half of the Nazis over the next 50 years" or if JFK said "we're going to put a man on the moon by 2010".
Also, since an actual solution would require a great deal of global cooperation and coordination, I don't think there's any scenario where the US is capable of addressing climate change in any meaningful way.
I think technological change is something good to focus on. Namely, changing the socio-economic system which has the most significant determinative effect on our environment. Libs like technological change except when you challenge the socio-economic organization of society, which they presume to follow "human nature" and to be something entirely natural rather than as something technological. They conceive of technology only in terms of gadgets and toys, but why should technology be limited to mere instrumental tools? Why shouldn't we consider the way in which we organize our society as technological? Perhaps part of the problem is the manner in which people take shit coming out of the economics department as naturalized facts, rather than as technological constructions which their own limitations. The capitalistic organization of society has been able to accomplish more than the feudalistic formation, however the very means which enabled it to do so, also functionally results in it being fundamentally unable to deal with poverty and climate change.