If coal burning were to be restricted or coal made more expensive via a carbon price, biomass cofiring (mixing harvested vegetation in with coal at coal-fired power plants) would probably be one of the first alternatives to appear.
I'm not suggesting any solution is silver bullet, but if combined with a pollution tax, our forests could provide a huge, reasonably profitable source of fuel, perhaps not as spectacularly profitable as fossil fuels, but profitable none the less.
ike I said, it's a near-term strategy and isn't scalable to eliminate fossil fuel emissions, but it can help some, if you sequester the biomass carbon somewhere so it doesn't return to the atmosphere.
I'm suggesting wood as a substitute for fossil fuels, not compensation. No one expects the stored wood to be carbon negative enough to counteract the rate at which we're burning other fuels.
Yeah yeah, you're a genius and everyone else who has ever worked on this problem is an idiot, too politically biased to see the plainly obvious solution that only you have thought of.
I'm not arguing that no ones though of this (or something better) before. The real problem is that the ones making the decisions are making them for their own political benefit. Lets say for example nuclear power is assumed to be cost effective and produce almost no pollution, but maintained its current stigma. Do you honestly think our politicians would advocate it anyway, in lieu of the public backlash?