Your car analogy is not very good. First of all, the car is not un-driveable yet. It has a ton of clear and worsening mechanical deficiencies that are hindering it, but it's still running. Secondly, we can't take it to the mechanic, we have to fix it while it's in motion. Also, there wasn't an accident, a single clear moment where it went from pristine to hopelessly damaged, it has been developing these mechanical issues gradually over a long period of time; they were predictable (and predicted), but accumulating slowly at first and then accelerating more recently.

So a bunch of people are now hanging out the windows and strapped to the undercarriage trying to fix the thing while it's rolling, and a bunch of other people are sitting in the back seat typing on their phones about how there is no problem, or about what we coulda woulda shoulda done, or about how the people working on the fixes are doing the wrong things, or about how we should just crash the car and get it over with. And that's all fine, people can make their own choices, but I'd rather be trying to figure out how to be one of the people working on fixing the cracks, rather than just being along for the ride.

> That is definitionally too little too late.

Note that I didn't actually say it isn't too little too late. But this is exactly how "perfect is the enemy of good" works. "Good" is never good enough, but it's still good. I agree with you that it's too little and too late to avoid a whole slew of bad things like the ones you listed, and probably worse. But I don't think it's too late to avoid the existential risks to the species. I do think it's too little, but its success makes me more, rather than less, optimistic about more efforts to come. And I get it, you'll think, "oh great, so all these horrible things will happen, and now we want to pat ourselves on the back just because we may be on the path to avoid wiping out the whole species?". And yes, that is the way in which it is good, despite not being good enough.

> A ton of these technologies are greenwashing existing tech because there's federal grants to be had for attempting it.

Which things are "greenwashing", in your view? It is indeed mostly targeted at existing technologies, because we already have really good technologies, which if deployed far more widely will already go a very long way toward solving the problem. This is a very good thing! We do need to invent more things, but that's not the bottleneck yet, the current bottleneck is deployment of things we've already invented.

> Others, like widely available solar, are complicated by the purveyors taking advantage of low-earners who've managed to get homes and fucking them into bankruptcy by adding money to their mortgage they can't possibly afford.

Residential roof-top solar is indeed not the thing to be excited about with respect to solar deployment, which is why it is not a major focus of the provisions in the IRA.

> Still others are things like EV's, which while better for the environment at point of use, are still highly damaging what with the incredible amounts of limited heavy metals required to build them, ...

The metals thing is not a non-issue, but is also wildly overblown. Importantly, EVs do not burn those metals; they are akin to the fuel tank, not the fuel. This is an advantage that is not ignored, exactly, but is often underrated.

> not to mention being shipped back and forth over the oceans because it's cheaper to build everything in Asia.

The IRA included provisions aimed at localizing material sourcing and manufacturing. Again, if your argument is that this isn't good enough, then I agree, but if your argument is that "the power structure" has done nothing about the issues you're worried about, then I don't agree.

> You must be joking. The reactionaries are having a FIELD DAY with 15 minute cities, bug eating, what have you.

I'm not sure how old you are, but if you weren't around for it, it might be enlightening for you to read about the backlash to the ACA (Obamacare). That is what a political backlash looks like. A fringe of reactionaries throwing silly pot-shots online is not a political backlash. There have been no mass protests calling for a repeal of the IRA because of its climate provisions. The opposition nominee for the presidency is not making this a center-piece of his campaign. Sure, there are some targeted things that they intend to undo or roll back, but it is not a major part of anyone's campaign rhetoric.

This is, truly, as good as it gets for a major piece of legislation. Nobody is particularly pissed about it, and the vast majority of its provisions are going to stand, regardless of who wins the next election. That is a very successful political outcome! Resist the urge to overindex on noisy edgelords online.

> Probably something to do with the fact that this discourse has been happening for half a century now and we're producing more CO2 than EVER and burning the rainforest down.

No, we have not been having this discourse for half a century. The discussion has shifted massively just over the decade and a half of my career, due in no small part to the massive shifts in the solutions we have to bring to bear on the problem.

Cynicism and nihilism are not the right conclusions to draw from the history of humanity working on this problem. The right conclusion is that progress can be made, and is being made more quickly now than at any point thus far, and continues to accelerate. Thank goodness!