Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture indus…
The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So…
Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.
Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.