Today's solar and wind boom was started in the 70s. It's kind of amazing how many people prefer the "bird in the bush" over the "bird in the hand".
Even today no industrial country is even close to having even all its energy from solar and wind. And were not even talking about transportation.
For an alternative level you can look at France. France basically removed fossil fuels from its electricity production in less then 20 years of producing nuclear. And we know that CO2 saved earlier is more valuable.
Now they never went to the step of trying to introduce alcohol fuels, as of course their goal was to limit import of oil to make the French economy resilient and not to save CO2.
I didn't say anything like that! What I meant is that the sustained technology development effort you called for actually happened for other energy-generating technologies, starting on the date you suggested. The result is that costs fell by several orders of magnitude, and also that it makes sense to widely deploy them now.
There are reports that Scotland has been generating 200% of household energy needs from wind alone in 2019. That sounds close to me. Here is a news report, and wiki: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/scotland-has-produced-enough...
But of course during the transition you would not really save on CO2. As methanol would still be produced by natural gas. But once you have it carbon neutral you can at least still use liquid fuel, and that's something the world will continue to use.
But alcohol fuels also burn much cleaner and release less actual harmful stuff and would make cities much healthier. So there are other things to consider outside of CO2.
But in general, for personal cars and stuff like that batteries are a better solution. The thing is, we could have done more alcohol fuels much earlier.
You're missing every other machine using non-ethanol fuel to operate which is required for harvesting/producing ethanol biofuel.
Ethanol's net CO2 output is positive, not negative. That is not good.
While you might argue that some cases of bioethanol in the first world are essentially just farm subsidies, producing sugarcane ethanol in favorable conditions (e.g. Brazil) definitely is profitable in the financial sense and also in the CO2 sense because it saves most of CO2 emissions compared to the fossil fuels they replace.
Of course, even in ideal conditions any fuel has zero net emissions and can't possibly have a net negative CO2 contribution by itself (that would require carbon sequestration) but every liter of gasoline/diesel that gets replaced by a low-CO2 fuel means a reduction of CO2 emissions.
You shouldn't compare something against a fictional zero, you compare it against realistic alternatives, so CO2 emissions are not only acceptable but actually desirable if they replace much larger CO2 emissions.
You can't set that aside. Consider the whole chain of production and usage or be consigned to a disingenuous selective argument upon the level of quack doctors. Plain and simple.
Usually this wouldn't happen because of climate change. France pushed nuclear because they wanted to be independent of Saudi princes.
But the French example clearly shows that a industrial country can go away from fossil fuel electricity in 15 years if its actually determined to do so and using nuclear energy. And they did it with 1960s technology, the same kind of effort with modern types of nuclear plants, could potentially be even faster.
There is no question in my mind if there was political consensuses on a plan, any industrial nation could move away from 90% of fossil fuels usage within 20 years and it wouldn't actually cost as much as people tend to think.
Once you have mass production of nuclear power plants, you can start using nuclear power to create liquid alcohol fuels. Start a process of changing cars to electric or alcohol based fuels, the same goes for ships and eventually planes.
The process of switching to alcohol based fuels can be started in parallel, with early on using fossil fuels.
Start taxing fossil fuel usage to make people move over to liquid fuels.
This vision was created out by one of the nuclear innovates. He invented the PWR (currently used nuclear) but rejected it as a terrible design for human energy production. His insistence that PWR were not 'perfectly save' got him essentially fired. He had come up with Molten Salt reactors to fix all the issues of PWRs.
His vision was more to use nuclear heat to turn salt water into water you can use for irrigation. Not really produce Liquid fuels in a carbon neutral way but the vision makes sense.
Now, unfortunately this should really have started in the 70s, but it would have been the most systematic approach to actually solving the problem. But of course that requires the population not to freak out about nuclear and to accept potentially higher oil prices.