But corporations don't have any incentive to do anything that hurts the profits they extract from the 99% (mostly indexed to energy prices, everyone is selling energy directly or indirectly) and politicians at best just do what people vote for (better standard of living, which mostly depends on cheaper energy prices).
Correct. And individuals alone are mostly useless. So the solution is to form collectives, get all the consumer class, or most of them, aligned, and then we have bargaining power.
It may work if fossil consumers like China, Japan, parts of Africa and South America, India and Europe work together to sustainably penalize and eventually get off fossil fuel dependence, but the fossil fuel exporter cartel will fight this :/
It's not shying from it, many just don't see a way forward that doesn't involve a significant risk of massive suffering like starvation, war, authoritarianism if one or two things don't go exactly as the utopians would expect (like most revolutions).
This is not a utopian project, this is a "controlled landing" of a large spaceship from a 200-year old addiction to fossil-fueled growth: you need everyone on board and an awareness of the risks by everyone and possibility of relapses, calm and a notion of what is at stake, but there is still a chance that we'll fuck up, given our history :/
No one expects utopia. That's a bit of a false dichotomy. But it doesn't have to be utopia to be better than we have it now. I totally get not wanting to risk things, but that's the only way to move forward. You (broadly, not individual you) can either step up, grab the controls, and then at least if you crash, you had agency. We're flying into the mountain as is, gotta try something.