In the matter of "Is climate change a problem, yes or no?", there are extremists on both sides.
Finding an idiot who said fifteen years ago "We are all unavoidably doomed within a decade", is not, in fact, a good reason to think that the answer is "no".
Idiots who get to the right answer for the wrong reasons, or who exaggerate the size of the problem, are easy to find. But their existence in no way justifies the conclusion that there's no problem.
If you want to know whether there is a problem, and if so, how serious it is, you need to ignore the enthusiasts and extremists on both sides, and listen to the experts - the people who are qualified to have a useful opinion.
Those people are saying that there is a problem, and that it is potentially serious, but can be mitigated if we act to keep atmospheric CO2 levels sufficiently low.
How we can achieve that mitigation is a bigger problem, because it rapidly becomes political - there are lots of things that can be done, but all require people to accept changes that they don't like.
IMO, any "grassroots" effort is doomed, because real people are selfish arseholes. If we decide that everyone should use less energy on an individual basis, then most people won't comply without draconian enforcement; And most people don't want draconian enforcement to be enacted.
The solutions need, like the source of the problem, to be applied not to the myriad consumers, but to the much smaller number of fossil energy producers.
We need to make extracting (and then burning) coal, oil and gas uneconomical. Or to make the extractors pay to recover from the atmosphere any CO2 put into it from their products.
Set a carbon tax at source (import dock, mine, or wellhead) equal to the cost of sequestering CO2, and use the revenue thus raised for that specific purpose.
This would lead to an actual "net zero" emissions regime, with no technology specifically supported nor suppressed. If the cheapest way to make electricity, or to power ships, cars, or aircraft, under such a regime is the status quo of burning fossil fuels, than that's no problem; Every tonne of CO2 produced will fund the sequestration of a tonne of CO2.
Everything will be more expensive, of course. Because we will no longer be able to pretend that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere costs nothing. It does have a cost, and that cost is easy to determine (it's the cost of getting it back out of the atmosphere again).
Such a scheme incentivises innovation in carbon neutral power systems, and in carbon sequestration schemes - if a coal miner can come up with a cheaper way to sequester CO2, he can slash his tax bill; And if someone wants to generate carbon free nuclear power in competition with a carbon spewing coal power plant, that person gets a level playing field, where his competitor isn't allowed to externalize the cost of waste management.
This idea appeals to neither group of extremists. The coal, oil, and gas lobby wants to maintain its unfair advantage of having free waste disposal; And the neo-luddites don't want people to be allowed to use any amount of energy they are prepared to pay for.
A pox on both their houses. Civilisation requires technology and lots of energy use in order to flourish. But nobody is entitled to piss in the swimming pool without paying to clean up their mess.
ICE vehicles need not be banned. As long as the cost of gasoline includes the cost of recovering the CO2 it generates, the choice of whether to use gasoline or electricity or pedal power or whatever can (and should) be left up to the individual consumer.
