I don't think I buy it.
Not the futility of corporate climate action--I get that. If you believe in free trade, that corporations compete with each other, and that not all countries are going to care about climate goals, it's pretty hard to see how corporate climate action can accomplish much beyond losing business in proportion to how much impact the business has on the climate. There's a little bit of wiggle-room because virtue sells (and these days, not radically restructuring the Earth's ecosystems counts as virtue). Not much, though. Mostly it's price per service.
What I don't buy is the transformation.
When have we ever had a successful intentional transformation?
Ever?
The industrial revolution wasn't prompted by thinking, "Oh gosh, wouldn't it be so much better to pack people into cities doing menial labor using machines instead of spread all over on farms...let's go make that happen!" No. We were all, "Oh wow this automatic loom is SO COOL, now we can make WAY more thread!" And before we knew it...BAM!...industral revolution. Marx, bless his heart, decided what we needed was a good ol' TRANSFORMATION of society. And as we know, that really worked out swell.
And as if doing something we've never done before wasn't enough, you're tossing in colonialism, linear thinking, social justice goals, and so on? Are you sure? Isn't one impossible problem enough?
Change almost always comes from the middle. Start at the bottom, and you are so lost in details you can't get anywhere. Start at the top and even if you manage to have the pull to change everything (extremely unlikely), you won't have enough understanding of the long-timescale behavior of extremely complex systems intertwined with human society to have any clue how to get it to work the way you want. But if you start in the middle, you can get somewhere.
The economy needs a stupendous amount of energy. Everyone wants more energy, and they spew tremendous amounts of CO2 in order to get it.
You can't make people not want energy. But you might be able to spew way less CO2 while creating it. Is it cheap? No? Forget it--that's useless. Yes, but it's non-peaking? It's geographically isolated? Okay, now we're talking. Was there really any reason we had to run the most energy-demanding processes when we did, or can we do it while the sun is shining or the wind is blowing? Was there really any reason the plant had to be here rather than there? Is there really any reason Germany needs to heat itself using gas from Russia instead of electricity from the Sahara?
If Germany relies on electricity from the Sahara is it going to take a kinda selfish kinda colonialist approach to Chad and Niger? Welllllll, it probably will, but with better awareness we at least could hope for a kinder and gentler colonialism, where Chad and Niger are richly rewarded for their immensely valuable resource even if Germany meddles some in their politics and such because it's really important to them to keep the electricity flowing (and they paid for most of the infrastructure).
Big changes happen when we identify the key barriers to adoption at large scale and relentlessly attack those. This works. It's always worked. It works even if we don't want it to work. It works even if we wish it didn't work and pine for the old days in the fields and hills listening to the cow-bells.
Big changes happen from the middle. We can identify the directions the changes need to go (e.g. lower carbon), get to work in that direction, and then...see how things turn out. It's really the only way things ever work, but if we recognize it, we can steer the process at least a little bit, and hopefully end up with enough surplus resources and attention to make headway on our other pressing problems like colonialism and species loss.