1. In terms of CO2 equivalent, when you include all of the gases, we're at 479 already. That's towards the right hand side of the table in the link I cited.
2. As I noted, renewables only very recently began to take off. As of now, new generating facilities in the US and Europe are almost all renewables. Solar is growing so fast in the US that last year (I ran the figures on a spreadsheet) the admittedly tiny share solar had peaked in October rather than in the summer, and the only decent explanation for that is that so much solar was going online that the incremental additions of the new capacity overwhelmed what should have been a much larger decrease than what actually occurred in the power generated. That means we'll see a big bump this year as we get to the sunny part of the year just from what was installed last year.
3. Hydro is not performing well because of the drought half the country is going through, so this year's increases in wind and solar will probably wind up not helping in increasing the total share of renewables because they'll have to make up for the decline in hydro generation.
But in a few years the additions to wind and solar capacity will be too large to not make a difference. There will be a very bad time though, when CO2 will still be rising even as more of these come online. The real dent in fossil fuel usage is still ten years away, but once their share starts to decline, it will be much faster than most people are thinking. The decline in the price of solar is very steep, and is a function of its increasing use. It's in a nice virtuous circle where as more gets installed the price declines accelerate. Getting the cost down is what was needed, and that's happened. Getting enough installed to make fossil fuels uneconomical is the next goal, and I think we'll be a lot closer to that in a decade than most people are anticipating. I think ALEC realizes this, which is why you see them suddenly very active in trying to slow it down.
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