... until it's at the brink of too late.

Salvation will only come with a huge step back in the American lifestyle. I'm no Luddite, but I see more and more problem bearing solutions.

Most proposals to reduce the environmental footprint of humans are huge steps forward and will improve the lives of everyone in terms of health and happiness.

Many environmentally destructive things that supposedly makes us happy (according to the smiling faces on television) are actually great sources of misery to many people.

Automobiles are no source of happiness for people who can't really afford to keep them in good repair but need them to work. They are no source of happiness when people killed or maimed in automobile accidents. If we dismantle our automobile culture by rebuilding our cities to make car ownership unnecessary people might be happier and healthier. That would be a step forward, not a step back.

Having more children than one can comfortably support is often a source of great misery. If birth control and realistic sex education is readily available to all then people might be healthier and happier and human population growth halted. That's a step forward, not back.

Factory farm meat and dairy production is bad for the environment, bad for the people who work in that industry, and worse for the animals...

Etc.. I can easily go on.

... we over consume energy and resources in an extraordinarily lopsided and more and more unsustainable fashion.

Quitting a bad habit like smoking would be a "step forward" to a healthier life.

Taking up smoking again, after quitting, would be a "step back."

Today is not any kind of golden age and yesterday was only worse. There is no golden age of humanity, even when earth's human population was measured in the millions.

When I was a kid my grandma would drive me and my siblings around Los Angeles in her Cadillac. That car got terrible gas mileage and had no smog control systems. The gasoline sold then contained toxic lead that damaged people's brains and nervous systems. The air in the city was often brown and obviously poisonous, it burned your eyes, throat, and lungs. Does anyone want to "step back" to that?

Hydrogen was being proposed as a solution to the smog problem in the 'sixties. It was bullshit then as it is now. Cleaning up one place, let's say Los Angeles or Beijing, by sacrificing another place, the Mojave or Mongolian deserts, is not a step forward, it's a step back.

I invite you to look at the first sentence in the abstract, which is publicly available.

Lacking the natural gas resources the U.S.A. has, China would like to synthesize gas from coal in Inner Mongolia (which is part of China, not the nation of Mongolia) for transport to major cities across China.

Inner Mongolia has about a quarter of the world's known coal reserves and would become, by analogy, China's Texas in terms of gas production.

This would also leave most of the pollution in Inner Mongolia away from the Chinese elite in other places, except for the greenhouse gasses which everyone on earth will suffer.

If we humans had any common sense we would quit fossil fuels entirely. Unlike the U.S.A., China is enthusiastically building nuclear power plants which are the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels.

U.S.A. natural gas, from Wikipedia:

At least that would be less of a greenhouse gas threat.

DME has an atmospheric half life of about 5 days.

Interestingly the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to make methanol, DME, and/or methane is exothermic, even if the entropy may be assumed to slightly negative as five gas molecules are reduced to three gas molecules in the methane case, nine gas molecules to seven in the DME case. If the generated heat is not recovered in some way, the exergy loss is increased, although I often reflect on using these reactions to drive heat engines, thus recovering exergy.

The point is, all the fossil fuel marketing going on here rebranding those fuels as "hydrogen" notwithstanding, all this will only make the climate disaster worse, faster.