I mean this: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/why-clean-energy-...
Technology did that. With lots of government subsidies, and in particular with Germany kick starting a ton of solar industrial development.
Even in the US, with concerted anti-renewable sentiment at all levels of decision makers in both electric utility leadership and government leadership, new electricity is overwhelmingly carbon-free, because the technologists made it the cheapest:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
Technologists caused massive social change, by changing the technology. Far more than the people that focused only on culture and changing society through those means.
Sure. That's good, I fully agree with you on that. But is this the solution, or just treating the symptom rather than the root cause?
Technology by itself has never been the problem, the problem is the scaling up of it. Fossil fuels are harmless at a small scale, it's only once you exploit enough of them that you start to see harmful effects. But renewables are no different: we're drawing from the Earth's natural energy allocation, but that's the same energy that heats the planet in the first place -- so as we scale up renewables, we will also end up wrecking the planet. We'd need to scale it up so much it feels preposterous, but it seems obvious to me that if we can, we will. There is no upper limit to energy demand.
And that's what I'm worried about in the long term, I suppose: that surprised Pikachu moment where human ingenuity (and AI, I guess) worked so hard on extracting every bit of solar energy that the rest of the planet, not receiving any of it anymore, predictably turned into an ice ball. This kind of nonsense could never happen if we could properly look and plan ahead as a society, but neither would climate change, so.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that renewables are booming, but we could also have built a sustainable utopia on the back of fossil fuels if we had properly budgeted their use. We need to switch ASAP and start budgeting, because the problems we currently have aren't the only problems we will ever have, and the size of them, unfortunately, tends to scale with energy.