Biggest problem is that climate change aggressively challenges many foundations of capitalism and consumerism.

That's a religion to some people. And this is akin to changing it.

Capitalism has been and will be an essential ingredient to solve the problem and switch to other sources of energy. The issue is that the costs to the global environment are not borne by the polluters. Put a price tag on pollution and the market will do the best it can.

Well in the end capitalism determines everyone's personal incomes. As long as the rich keep getting relatively richer and the population bigger the economy has to grow in order to leave at least near as much income for people in general as before.

Yes, people are convinced. But ask them to give up a little of their comfort and they start rioting. I see it in my (european) city, even smallish measures to restrict car usage lead to major contestations.

China is convinced? Then China should tell China to stop building coal power plants.

They burn slightly more coal than the rest of the world combined.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environmen...

> China is convinced? Then China should tell China to stop building coal power plants.

You realise you're source says they're doing exactly that?

"In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018."

They've also gone all in on solar, having more installed capacity than any other nation. They're far from perfect, but they've started to acknowledge the problem at least.

Not only that, but they've taken all these steps while they're bringing hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty doing sustenance farming and into cities. Cities where they want things like electricity and cars. Look at the history of the world, development like that is usually fueled by burning as many hydrocarbons as possible. It's very good to see a country able now to at least start to break away from that. The rapidly dropping price of solar, thanks in large part to China plays a big role in that.

Despite setbacks China is also actively building up more nuclear capacity, something I wish was taken more seriously in the US http://energypost.eu/china-2016-year-nuclear-power/

China also has a sizable population to match.