The operational difficulty is that you got to get millions (actually many tens of millions) to buy into the idea. We can make energy saving tech available, but ignorance, and stubbornness are likely to mean that penetration is low -look at CFL bulbs, the vast bulk of bulbs/households have not replaced them.    Its really really difficult to get masses of people to change. Particularly if it is in the interests of the powers that be to only sell them on the easy stuff.

   Not that you(we) shouldn't try. But past experience indicates it will be very difficult to make substantial progress.

people ignore the media which is full of advice on how to eat healthy.  but yet the grocery aisles are filled with food byproducts and death wish foods.

if you can't get people motivated to improve their own personal health who is going to give a rats dam about global warming?

plus for most people its still a theory. its unlikely that the worlds population will embrace the reality until more negative affects are felt first.

You ask the question, "Can technology alone stop global warming?", as if technology's some sentient force itself focused on resolving the problem.

So that makes your first question a sort of strawman  and irrelevant, inconsequential distraction.

Even if, hypothetically, 100% of politicians had a change of heart RIGHT NOW, and adopt the means to deploy technology as fast as possible, I'd rather know or evaluate within some parameter of confidence, whether technology is even sufficient "to stop global warming," or bring us back to the levels that Hansen recommends.

That answer might be yes, but it certainly informs decisions about whether to invest limited efforts and funds into changing the hearts and minds of politicians.

Two, we are already paying the price...our incomplete economic theories just doesn't capture or measure it.  So I'm unconvinced of the effectiveness of merely moving to a holistic, full-price assessment.  At the end of it, is destruction, impoverishment and horrific realities.  In some ways, we're already there, the play written, but just not acted out, as with polar bears.  So just accurately recording costs of climate change probably is the eventual refuge of climate deniers.  Just like with life cycle assessment, Nature and its consequences and complications...WE JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND and therefore cannot accurately measure.  But it should be sufficient to understand viscerally that things will be bad, for everybody in very tangible personal ways, that we're already experiencing.

Third, well, this to me should come first.  But I've rambled enough, so I'll leave it at that.

"Major price change, to add a cost to emitting greenhouse gases that approximates the terrible damage done by them."

I know you are talking about carbon pricing and trading.  Because you (and every other expert in this area) believe that the only way to really get the move to renewables and conservation done is to use market forces.

And you all believe that the only way to move markets is to get corporate leadership to go along.  And the only way to do that is to give them a bottomline reason, because that is the only motivation in the corporate world.

Corporate greed is neither good or bad, but it is reality?  Isn't that how the argument proceeds?  Corporate control of our economy and government is the reality and it will never change.

I think it is possible to generate that bottomline reason without opening up yet another venue for corporate control and hedge fund trading.

Simple subsidy diversion prices carbon.  The big energy corporations will go along eventually.  

Of course you will say it is politically impossible to take subsidies away from energy corporations (and their manufacturing adjuncts, that make  autos, power plants, appliances, homes, food) and direct them to we the people.

And on the other hand, carbon trading already has the support of a lot of CEOs.  But why do they support it?  Because it's another tactic that they can game.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

The comments here I think misunderstand your larger point that we shouldn't stand around waiting for technology dreams while not also moving on other regulatory reform.  Which is, logically, not the same as saying that we must pick either regulatory reform or technology.  So on that level, I agree with you.

Re: your three points -

Do we need political change?  Absolutely, in the sense that anyone who even smells like Inhofe is a part of the problem, and so we need new leadership.  But I think it is idealistic to assume that a different party or ideology would change the underlying political realities, in which electoral pressures will always make it difficult for locally-elected politicians to effectively address global problems.  Every 100 years or so we get a Jefferson, or a Marshall plan, but in any era, the odds are that the most inspiring politicians are going to have a hard time passing any policy that shifts wealth out of their district.  (See: Obama's waffling on coal as just one recent example.)  What we can do though is at the grass roots level, coming up with creative ways to solve those global problems that don't force the fallible mortals we elect to choose between the global good and their electoral chances.  In other words, the onus is to some degree on the green community to empathize with those politicians and give them good solutions.  (One of my favorite DC aphorisms is that a congressman is only as smart as his lobbyists allow him to be...)

 Yes, but I'd put it less punitively.  We simply need to price in the externalities of pollution.  

Re: behavioral change, I agree, except that it may not be conscious.  Regulation plays a role here.  When smoking was banned on planes, it was hard to imagine how much cleaner the air would be... but if you've ever been in a third-world airport (or, God forbid, a third-world airline), it is striking how much that one particular behavioral change is now taken for granted.  If we put a price on carbon emissions, mandate higher fuel economy standards, etc. we will also induce behavioral changes that will not always be obvious to the person changing.  In my experience, people are way more malleable than regulatory theory believes.