California and Australia are suffering because we have stopped letting small fires burn regularly so they build up into massive walls of fire. Importing pretty trees from Australia to California was also a mistake, I watched all of this happen as I was growing up. That isn't climate change, that's mismanagement and kneejerk reactionism: fire seems bad, so stopping all fires is good, OH SHIT ALL THE UNDERBRUSH FUELED A NIGHTMARISH INFERNO, HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?
I must have a sad chuckle at the idea that you can't solve something predicated on CO2 emissions which the cheapest forms of electricity currently produce by forcing the poorest parts of the world to stop using the cheapest forms of electricity production they have and instead use... something?
Both climate change and forest management are places where government policy has been misguided away from science. Land use changes are a massive contributor to CO2, and in turn increasing CO2 is leading to weather shifts that are making already mismanaged forests more flammable and extending the fire season. Clearly we agree that we need actual scientific oversight on the matter rather than right-wing knee-jerk policy. It's more complicated still by the fact that you can't have "small fires" in forests that border neighborhoods. You clearly need to have an environmental management plan that doesn't destroy people's houses and way of life, and it needs to account for the way things are instead of the way they used to be.
As for power for the global poor, solar with storage is cheaper
when amortized over the lifetime of the system. It doesn't take a technological shift to move away from fossil fuel to solar, it takes a financial one. And it takes an infrastructural shift, too. Any one of these composting-toilet solar-light-bulb or whatever initiatives could make a big difference if you managed to ship a billion units to Sub-Saharan Africa instead of 100 to a test community in Whyoming.
But that's still a false dichotomy; the poorest parts of the world produce a truly tiny amount of CO2 compared to the industrial world. Our concern must be how to make way for a world where nobody has to be poverty-stricken, yet the burden of sustaining human life doesn't destroy the ecology of Earth. A 2000-year-old forest cannot be replaced without leaving it alone for 2000 years, and a 2-million-year-old species that goes extinct will never come back, not even in two million years. These things have value, and the wealthy world's irresponsible use of fossil fuels is destroying that value. And more, it must be done in a way that isn't magical white people showing up from oversees to tell people they're living wrong. It needs to be a movement where the post-industrial world, for once, treats other people like equals and stops funding criminals and warlords to serve their interests.
It seems to me similar to road construction crews in South America
demolishing a Mayan site for gravel. It's so short-sighted and irresponsible and irreversible, how can someone argue against preventing it?
EDIT: And none of that is mutually exclusive with making sure the United States has the same basic respect for it citizens as Bahrain, Russia, Qatar, or Kazakhstan. (That is, free healthcare.)