Not scalable
Only a few (or the one!) percent of the population could afford this article's vision of a lifeboat. The renewable tech mentioned above is not scalable enough. Putting up roof top solar is nice but only provides a fraction of what is needed to maintain current living standards - and I am talking medicine, education, food, high standards of hygiene, and housing - not the stuff we buy from China. Would we despoil most of the land for solar panels? How about eliminating all trees to grow biofuel? Still not enough - France in WWII had only a portion of autos converted to wood gas (yes biofuel) and the place was nearly completely deforested. Current wealth and living standards only happened after scalable use of fossil fuels. The only other fuel which has proven to be scalable is Nuclear. Nuclear is the ONLY carbon free scalable power source. The choice is stark - if global warming is really a priority, then go nuclear, else stick with fossil fuels where technology and efficiency gains can (maybe) offset the increasing cost of non-conventional fuels. If we go with fossil fuels - again because we have decided that climate change is not important enough to go nuclear, then the next decision point will be in several hundered to several thousand years when the unconventional fossil fuels run out. The above article is a nice pipe dream.
