India, Jan. 15 -- We could have fixed carbon emissions. Really! We had the tech, the engineers, the math, and even the urgency. But we lacked realism. Instead of building a realistic, resilient, low-carbon energy system, we spent the past two decades staging a moral theatre about fossil fuels, complete with heroes, villains, hashtags, and spiritual cleansing rituals like "net-zero." It became less climate policy, more climate cosplay.

Somewhere along the way, energy stopped being an engineering problem and became a moral referendum. Oil was evil. Gas was betrayal. Coal was a mortal sin. The fact that half the world still lacked reliable electricity was treated as a minor inconvenience, a footnote to the sermon. So instead of asking, how ...