Yes. we can! But not enough

A new study just published in Energy Policy; we've already developed advanced enough technology to power the world with clean power -- it's just a matter of finding the social and political will to deploy it. Stanford University News reports: The
researchers' plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy. Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

This has been a contested point with some believing that technology is not the solution as much as energy conservation. Technology is aiding the progress, but it is not enough to do the full changeover. Take for instance, a team of engineers at the Brookhaven and Los Alamos National Laboratories have created a light-absorbing material that efficiently generates charge and charge separation. The thin film material is a blend of semiconducting polymer doped with fullerenes. Under strictly controlled conditions, the concoction self-assembles into a regular pattern of micron-sized, hexagonal cells. The film thus “grows” to cover a relatively large area of several millimeters. Yet, these are technology that will take time to develop and cannot be deployed in the next couple of years.

Meanwhile according to the BBC, International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol has "said the unsayable"--during a lecture at Imperial College London noting that the utter lack of political ambition to tackle climate change and do anything meaningfully strong enough to curb greenhouse gas emissions means that 1) peaking emissions by 2020 is virtually impossible and therefore 2) we can "kiss goodbye" and hope of keeping global average temperature rise below 2°C.

So, what do we do?