Some progress on CO2 sequestration technologies
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Not to be glib, and I'm no agronomy expert, but a quick google tells me that's about equivalent to a square mile of hay field. Seems like if you were serious about this problem and wanted an economical solution, buying a farm and burying the output would be more effective than throwing money at startups like this.
Articles like this are always written from a tone of "If ONLY there was some way to economically extract and concentrate carbon from the atmosphere", by journalists who then go home and tend the heirloom snap peas in their raised beds without a sense of irony. Plants do this. It's literally what makes them plants.
Now... maybe there's a stronger economic argument for technologies like this, but if there is it's not filtering into the press hits. I remain suspicious.
This is akin to saying (in the early 1900's) "Planes can only fly short distances, are very expensive, and can't carry any serious loads. It would just be better to put this money into trucking."
Someone who threw a ton of venture cash at "Air Freight Ltd." in 1913 or whatever would have lost their shirt.
Back to the point: I'm not saying this won't work. I'm saying that there are firm limits to how well it MUST work just to be better than technology that was proven out five millenia ago. That's a really high bar, and it needs numbers and not press hits.
It would be as if someone started doing research on vacuum tube transistor technology today if we were having a global compute crisis and we also had limited amount of sand with which to make glass and sand was an essential resource in all sorts of other things like the food supply chain.
What impact on cities? Cities take up almost no space and are irrelevant when talking about planting forests and then sinking them in the ocean. At worst there will be more freight train noise.
I've done some further googling and found some studies on the topic, though on-land: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0... and some more from a presentation https://www.feem.it/m/events_pages/20167111127315Zeng_presen...
Though the question still remains how securely the CO2 would be stored under the ocean. Maybe with a large enough layer of rock on top it would suffice.. I suppose it's high time we started field trials on all these approaches.
My own back-of-napkin calc says that we'd need to cut about .1 to .2 % of tropical rainforests per year and remove them from the carbon cycle, not sure if that's right.
The industrial chemistry infrastructure required to drive this sequestration at the same scale literally doesn't exist by several orders of magnitude. Even worse, the tremendous power generation capacity to support that industrial chemistry infrastructure also doesn't exist. We're talking global GDP levels of CapEx just to build the infrastructure that would make it possible to build sequestration infrastructure that could remove CO2 on a reasonable time frame. Biomass requires none of this investment to operate at the same scales.
These prototypes of industrial sequestration are only pricing in the OpEx and the CapEx of the facility itself. At scale, you also have to pay for the creation of the entire supply chain from scratch -- the factories, power plants, mines, logistics, etc that allow these sequestration facilities to exist at the required scale. The only way the fully burdened cost remotely makes sense is in applications where none of this infrastructure needs to be built i.e. small scale applications. For global atmospheric CO2 reduction, the fully burdened cost of sequestering CO2 via industrial processes is never going to be viable due to industrial chemistry economics.
Industrial chemistry is not embarrassingly parallelizable.
Wait, what? Biomass uses solar.
The industrial chemistry for sequestering CO2 is not that expensive in terms of mass ingredients (nothing rare or exotic), considering the scale, but it is extremely energy intensive and that is where most of the cost of sequestration comes from. If almost all of the sequestration cost is the cost of putting energy into the system then biomass has a massive cost advantage, literally orders of magnitude.
To this I fully agree. This problem isn't going to be solved by industry. I'm not sure why people are putting that on the table. There is no incentive for them (unless you put huge carbon taxes on as well). This is really a thing where we have to cut our losses and say "It is cheaper to build these now than the cost of the damage of what happens if we don't." There's no industry incentive for that. But there is huge public and governmental incentive.
It would be great if it could feasibly scale but there is no science that supports that notion. Any chemical engineer worth a damn can figure that out on the back of a napkin.
Scaling is hard for industrial chemistry, same as with software, and it is only weakly parallelizable. The idea that we will take one of these prototypes and scale it a million-fold (literally) while increasing efficiency by 1-2 orders of magnitude is completely implausible for well understood boring engineering reasons. And even if we could do this, the economics are barely within the realm of plausibility.
Biomass, on the other hand, has math that works out (still expensive though).
What are you basing that math on?
At $100 per ton it's about 4 trillion dollars a year to capture all current emissions.
That's five percent of world GPD. And that's ignoring any attempt to reduce emissions, or to more efficiently capture carbon at power plants.
Even at the current price of $600 if we reduced emissions by half we could afford that.
And for land use, 40 billion / 1 million * 300 acres is 19k square miles, or one sixth of Nevada.
Would there be material shortages? Are all those prices fake?
The price is literally infinite at that scale as the resources do not exist.
Money can buy employees and manufacturing capacity. What are the things that would cost more per unit the more you buy?
Grab a factor of ten from reduced emissions and another factor of 100 from tech improvements and it's still way out of reach
This single tiny test plant is capturing 4 thousand tons.
The number you read is wrong by miles.
If we look at $100 a ton and guess that half of that is power at 10 cents a kWh, we would need 20 petawatt hours per year. Current world production is 25 petawatt hours per year.
Their $100 per ton is extremely optimistic because it doesn't require building the upstream supply chain that can feed their processes at the required scale. It isn't like this is something that already exists, it all has to be built from scratch, is amortized into the cost per ton, and has much worse than linear scalability. I'm not sure how to accurately convey just how qualitatively inaccurate your perception of our capacity to do this at scale is.
Constructively, I'd like to see the argument that we can manufacture the potassium hydroxide at the scale required to sequester all 20th century CO2 in 20 years. The math, inputs, and capacity for the entire supply chain are public. There is much opportunity for rigor but even cursory analysis shows that it is not remotely feasible to effect CO2 sequestration this way even with heroic efforts. And that is under the most ideal of circumstances.
There are finite supplies of everything. We've only every been able to do gigaton industrial chemistry when it was strongly thermodynamically favored; in this case we are trying to run it backward up a steep gradient. The chemical processes described would also require globally depleting mined chemicals that we also use to produce food.
We would need to manufacture several orders of magnitude more raw materials, including the entire upstream supply chain, than exists today. The actual scale is comparable to current global GDP for many of the proposed industrial plant solutions when scaled up. We simply don't produce the required chemicals, nor have the underlying resources to produce said chemicals, at anything remotely resembling those scales. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. I trained as a chemical engineer, I can do the math.
It isn't a problem of employees. We literally have no capacity to produce the upstream resources to feed these industrial designs at the required scale. The inputs to their process are not produced by magic. This is a fairly technical point but literally no one has offered a proposal for how the chemistry would scale to a level that would solve atmospheric CO2 this century.
It is a really hard problem. We are trying to run planetary scale thermodynamics backward. The amount of energy required is mind-boggling even in the most optimistic scenarios.
We then don't take into account the most expensive part, buying the land. In Texas a 500 acre ranch already prepped for hay or other crops costs about 1-2 million dollars to buy.
Furthermore, plants aren't perfect. Many plants also respirate co2 as well as oxygen. It's not a perfect equation like in grade school.
A more focused criticism would be: it's not enough for that fancy plant to work, it needs to be cheaper than a hayfield at scale to be worth it. And I'd want to see numbers showing that. Farms are not, in fact, particularly expensive relative to venture backed startups.
By the way, a square mile is exactly 640 acres.
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/land-use/afforestation
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/planting-1-2-trillion-trees-cou...
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76
and in many similar research papers.
[edit: formatting]
The only scalable sequestration technology is biomass for the sole reason that it is the only method that does not require creating new power generation facilities to feed industrial chemistry plants at an unprecedented scale. Sequestering CO2 requires application of energy and mass on the same scale as the energy that was released by putting it into the atmosphere in the first place.
You can't cheat the laws of thermodynamics.
The only place where those technologies could make sense would be on the industry generating a lot of CO2 in a concentrated manner. Or if you are creating a Mars colony, where it could be used to control your system.
So, GHG net heating effect is proportional to the amount of heat escape they block for as long as they remain in the atmosphere.
IFF that's the case, we've added 375 billion tones of carbon to the atmosphere. Some estimates say that 50% of carbon is removed from the atmosphere every 20 years. So if our emissions stop growing, we'll eventually reach an equilibrium not far from what it is now. Plus, don't most estimates have carbon emissions rapidly decreasing as renewables become more cost effective? I've seen some estimates as high as 70% by 2050.
Anyway, a tree over the course of 40 years, can sequester 1 ton of carbon. The Amazon Rain Forest has ~390 Billion trees. So, if we could plant another Amazon Rain Forest and keep our emissions where they are (or hopefully reduce them) couldn't we avoid any further warming?
I've had this idea forever, but I'm just doing the math now. If we lined every street and highway in the US with trees, that might be enough to sequester the carbon we've added (and will add before equilibrium) to the atmosphere.
There's 5.3 million miles of road in the U.S. If you spaced the trees 10 feet apart, you could plant 528 trees per side per mile, or ~1000 per mile. That means, we could plant 5.3 billion trees, or 1/75th of an Amazon Rain Forest. If you added in every country in the world (there's 64.25 million miles of paved road and probably well over 150 million miles of paved and unpaved roads), we could plant like 1/6 to 1/2 of an Amazon.
I feel like if you added in shrubs and flowers and combined the insect biomass increase, this could actually be a thing... I mean, you could also potentially bio-engineer trees for maximum sequestration & particulate absorption. And probably there's trees you could plant 3 feet apart instead of 10 that could sequester the same amount of carbon.
We could probably capture a lot of particulates from the roads as well, naturally cool cities with added shade (and make them prettier), and increase insect biomass (which has shrank like 75% in the last 27 years).
At least in the US -- Oaks, Chestnuts, and Walnuts sequester a lot of carbon per square foot. Chestnuts are native to the northeast, and Oaks are native in the west (California oaks are one of the prettiest trees IMO), and Walnuts are native in the South.
Pin Oaks don't take up much space, they grow really fast (70 feet in 28 years), and weigh literally tons. They thrive basically everywhere in the U.S. beside Arizona, Florida, and Coastal California. It also has shallow roots, which would keep it from destroying sidewalks / roads. Pair them with Hemlocks, Gold and Red Euonymus, & Climbing Hydrangea -- and our roads would be beautiful!
I dunno. It sounds crazy. But it also seems obtainable.
I'm not sure how this impacts methane, though. Unfortunately, global beef & pork production is growing quickly.
It's quite expensive, and all of those CO2 sequestration companies (including Climeworks) sound pretty prototype-y. Climeworks is the one with a consumer product and clearly states that they already remove CO2 from the atmosphere today. This is what I got back from sales when I asked if my money will be for R&D that might, one day, remove the CO2, or if it would support operational costs of a machine running today:
> you will receive we state the amount of carbon dioxide that has been removed in your name. No one else can put a claim to that amount. [...] we run the machines most of the time anyway [but] proving that there is a market for our services (such as CDR for individuals) makes it easier for us to broaden the application of our technology.
So that gives me a reasonable confidence, but I'll still spread out my CO2 compensation a little in case part of it turns out to be badly spent. And trees have more advantages than just producing rock, even if we'd need much more surface area and water to maintain those trees than to sequester CO2 into rock.
has at least some more information about it, thanks for the hint :-)
I have a question about these various carbon-buying efforts. Whether it's climeworks, or buying carbon offsets, or signing up for a service with your power company... do these things scale?
I mean, here in Portland I think you can sign up with PGE for having 100% of your electricity come from renewable sources, but I think that only 40% of their power comes from renewable. So really probably only 40% of their customers can sign up. As it is, not enough people have signed up, so they can still say so, but big picture, you're still really only getting 40%. And that's just the electrical part of our carbon footprint, which isn't the whole picture.
Same with the carbon-offset buying sites. I mean, they don't really work past a point, right? Like if every citizen in the world signs up, it implies we'd have the entire problem solved. But we wouldn't really, don't they all have upper limits? So how much do they actually scale? 50%, 10%, 1%?
The people who need convincing aren’t there due to math: it’s become a political loyalty test for Republicans in the U.S. and some other groups internationally, for many people accepting that climate change is real means major changes in their lifestyle and business, and there’s a huge industry supporting fake experts, think tanks, etc. pitching the message that you don’t need to do anything.
In that light, it’s not unreasonable to worry that people will use it to push the “no need to sacrifice now, new technology will fix everything” message, not unlike the people hoping we can avoid making simple infrastructure fixes because self-driving cars will solve everything real soon now.
That translates to 0.35€/L, which wouldn't even be half of the taxes already levied on gasoline in many european countries.
If it were phased in over time it would hopefully be another incentive for the uptake of electric cars.
I don't feel like working through all the countries to normalize the units; but the US tax is comically low by comparison. In many countries, your estimated cost is far below what they already pas in gas-specific taxes (although some of that tax might be for non CO2 issues)
To estimate how much that would increase the price at the pump, I would rely on estimates of how much fuel a tanker truck can carry, how many miles per gallon the truck gets, and the average distance from refinery to gas station -- which I am too lazy to try to look up.
The simple answer for preventing the economic damage is to return the money to everyone as a dividend. Then the average person pays $1000/year in carbon tax and receives a $1000/year dividend, which cancels out. On average. But if you reduce your carbon footprint to below average then you get more than you pay.
(This also helps the poor because they already burn less carbon on average but would receive the same dividend.)
For whatever reason the company fell apart but the VISA credit card is still in action.
The only thing I last heard that was economical/promising was olivine, is that turning into a dead end?
Pumping CO2 into the ground sounds like it works great on paper, but I think we're fooling ourselves that it won't reenter the atmosphere.
Iron fertilization in the ocean might help acidification, but not atmospheric.
Tree planting might help but the trees die and decay eventually, and we need to sacrifice grazing land for that.
Sequestration alone shouldn't be the solution, but if we can find a thermodynamically feasible way to store CO2 for at least thousands of years while getting away from new CO2 emission, it won't matter that the solution isn't fully permanent. Some proposed solutions are expected to be stable on long enough timescales that the CO2 can (under proper geologic conditions) turn into rock. Other solutions rely on keeping it in oxygen-poor environments where it won't oxidize (which is what happened with carbon that became fossil fuels in the first place; clearly that carbon was not permanently sequestered, since we're burning it now!).
As long as it's thermodynamically feasible to store carbon (read: our net carbon emission goes down and it doesn't cost too much in alternative energy sources), a relatively short (on geological timescales at least) storage solution is more than sufficient (again, as long as it's coupled with critically necessary reductions in new CO2 emission).
[edit] There are, to be clear, many geological formations that are more than stable enough to store volatile materials on longer timescales than are necessary (look at how effectively salt domes trap oil through a combination of buoyancy and impermeability of certain types of rock). The deep, possibly inescapable problem is the thermodynamic difficulty of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (where its concentration is low, and hence extraction is inefficient) vs. the relative ease of releasing energy from highly-concentrated carbon stores like fossil fuels. It's like trying to unmix your cream from your coffee; it's just much much easier to avoid pouring the cream in in the first place. As others have mentioned, we can rely on the fact that nature already gives us cheap distributed solar farms with built in sequestration abilities (also known as "plants"); non-biological methods don't come with the built in solar energy converter, and so we need to consider the harrowing reality of thermodynamics when trying to make them scalable.
EV/Solar/Wind should pass the economics of (centuries-long-engineered-and-ingrained!) ICE and petroleum soon. We're basically waiting on solid state batteries and some economies of scale for EVs, and solar/wind to just incrementally pass natural gas.
Then excess load can go to some synthesis of sequesterable or load-evening fuel, or some other scheme such as algae.
"136 million tons of capacity by 2040" is 0.136 gigatons, 1/400th of our current emissions.
This technology will help us handle the very last, most difficult to decarbonize parts of our industrial civilization. It's nowhere near effective enough to do anything more than that.
edit: still can't find evidence for >50. Latest numbers I see are 37.1 from 2018. Can you link a source?
There's another big reason to be negative as well. Even if total global emissions went to 0 (ZERO!) the planet would still warm. There's a feedback loop. We've warmed enough that we are melting a lot of ice that contains carbon, which gets released into the ocean and atmosphere. We have no choice but to go negative, and we need to encourage as many other countries to do so as well.
Consider the following points:
1) Climate lag. There is a 40 year delay between emissions and effects on the climate so the effects we are now seeing are from the emissions from the late 70s early 80s. We have emitted more GHG in the last 40 years than between 1850 and 1980. Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today we have a huge climatic bill ahead of us in the next 40 years.
https://skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Dela...
2) Self sustaining climatic systems commonly called feedbacks. These systems once triggered will keep affecting the climate even if we reach zero emissions. Eg: melting of Arctic ice, permafrost methane, etc.
https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedba...
3) There are currently 405ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere which will remain there for centuries and will keep having an effect on the climate unless we remove it.
From the last IPCC report:
> There is sufficient uptake capacity in the ocean to incorporate 70 to 80% of foreseeable anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, this process takes centuries due to the rate of ocean mixing. As a result, even several centuries after emissions occurred, about a quarter of the increase in concentration caused by these emissions is still present in the atmosphere.
4) It is usually stated that we are at about 1ºC of warming right now, but until recently the cooling effects of aerosols in the atmosphere were not well understood. A recent paper from 2019 showed that it's likely there is a lot more cooling going on and we could already be at about 2ºC of warming. This would mean we are in a much more difficult position than commonly believed.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/eaav0566
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.h...
This is an especially great tax for America because while costs of enforcement would be high in many countries. Americans are unusually honest.
Maybe after all that time we can start looking to other means to help address the issue rather keeping trying to alter it with legislation, but hey maybe the government will suddenly magically get its act together and things will work out.
Of course even if the entire USA went carbon nuetral tomorrow it wouldn't do much because the biggest contributer to CO2 emissions right now is China at almost 2x what the US producing.
So maybe looking into technology to reduce the problem is the way to go.
Almost every climate scientist will tell you that we'll need negative emission technologies in addition to reducing emissions. They're not a replacement.
(Which is actually the main problem with all these technologies... even reporting about them makes people think they can skip the hard part...)
If, say, enough of these were deployed to have a total negative balance, is that not enough?
So if you have a limited pot of money to do something about climate change then exclusively relying on sequestration gives you less overall reduction.
A critique about the article: Their 'moral hazard' is a joke. CO2 is fungible. Emitting 10 tonnes and sequestering 10 tons is the same as emitting none. If the former improves people's lives (airplanes, cars, power, etc.) the decision is a no-brainer.
[1] hypothetically beneficial due to variability in sun/wind in addition to geographic limitations. Power has to always be on, CO2 sequestration doesn't have to be.
Batteries may be out due to weight. Hydrogen on the other hand has a higher specific energy than gasoline
> Emitting 10 tonnes and sequestering 10 tons is the same as emitting none.
Emitting 10 tonnes of CO2 and not sequestering will improve people's lives today even more since they don't have to pay the cost immediately. The moral hazard is being lazy because theoretically someone in the future might pull off heroic efforts to save the planet.
Exactly. To restate, not emitting CO2 will make people's lives worse[1] but most of the environmental proposals I see don't seem to realize the sheer unreasonableness of their propositions which generally boil down to 'you' need to suffer (in concrete ways, e.g. a gas tax, not farming a rain forest, etc.) for the (vague) benefit of other people.
[1] Given the current state of technology.
re. putting the cart in front of the horse, I agree, but if air-CO2 sequestration does hit 150$/tonne as (optimistically) projected that works out to be a few bucks per gallon of gas: The economist in me says the optimal solution is to tack that on to every gallon sold (and ear mark it).
That reads fairly one-sided. Let's flip it and say you have to cut back on some luxuries today so our descendants don't die by the millions at the end of the century.
[1] Which is exactly the sort of activity we 'first-worlders' have been benefiting from.
And the best solution people are willing to come up with is putting a million tiny containers in place to catch all the water before we get flooded.
The problem with this method is immediately apparent: we're going to run out of space and also there's no way to be sure we're catching it in all the right places.
Simply fixing the tap so it doesn't spill water anymore is a much better solution.
We don’t just need to get to negative flux, we’ve already put too much CO2 in the atmosphere. We need to actively reduce it - fast. And then once we get back to a baseline, then keep it there.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.technologyreview.com/p/pub/le...
There's been a recent study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10842-5
Like, even matching what the optimistic climate models require (that all depend on rapid emission reductions) requires "more than half of today's energy production".
Ignoring the sheer massive scale of kit that would need to be produced, installed and run to achieve a total negative balance by sequestration, how many years or decades would that take ramping up?
Besides, if people believe there's a magic techie "fix" being rolled out, good reason to carry on chasing their developing country to USA levels of energy use, unsustainably. Forget EVs, insulation etc. Take every cheapest option - just as we always did. With that model you might never finish ramping up. To empty the pool, first turn the taps off.
We need carbon neutral industry and generation. We need negative to bring CO2 ppm back to pre-industrial levels, or even 1950 levels, to stop the year on year of oppressive summers and wildfires, and leave a little ice at the poles.
> even reporting about them makes people think they can skip the hard part
It also gives many hope. There's a lot of doom and gloom about global warming and climate change. We hear a lot about how we are past the point of no return. But in reality reducing emissions and employing sequestration technologies would make that untrue. It would mean we CAN get back to where we need to be.
I don't buy this whole argument about sequestration just encourages use of dirty energy. Consumers have very little choice and when they do being green has been in vogue for quite some time. I don't think sequestration is going to undo that thinking and popularity. Especially if we keep talking about the importance of both.
Whatever "the solution" in the end may be, we can all play our part. Individual, company or government.
Personally, I feel it's both wrong and harmful to play up feelings of "government should leave things to tech". That was never at play, in terms of working out a solution.
>Maybe after all that time we can start looking to other means to help address the issue rather keeping trying to alter it with legislation
The issue isn't being altered. Are you perhaps trying to say you think it's bad that the governments regulate what companies can do on their territory?
It makes perfect sense to fine companies that come onto the territory you own and are responsible for, when those companies pollute said territory.
Fining indeed doesn't solve the problem directly. It does offer a chance for reflection and study on the side of the companies.
The problem isn't that the government is trying to protect its territory and its people. The problem is that companies continue harming the environment despite the knowledge that this eventually kills people, animal and plant life.
What you're saying sounds a lot like the rethoric of "Don't fine us because we're not going to listen anyway". Which is downright evil.
>Of course even if the entire USA went carbon nuetral tomorrow it wouldn't do much because the biggest contributer to CO2 emissions right now is China at almost 2x what the US producing.
Respectfully, that is complete and utter bullshit. The impact would be gigantic.
It's not because there's still more to fix, that this means one action won't fix anything. That's absurd.
Also, the idea of "going carbon neutral tomorrow" is a strawman. A total exaggeration meant to portray the plans of one side as impossible. While those are not actually the plans to begin with.
Your entire post feels like anti-government propaganda.
But we need action now in order to help ameloriate the effects. If the political route has failed to produce results then it seems to me that we need to try a different avenue than what has not been working. In this case leaving it to invention and innovation to help address the problem.
It might not solve the problem on its own, but it won't be hurting it either and maybe it will lead to breakthroughs that do solve the problem.
I meant my last paragraph not as a critique of current carbon reduction efforts but rather to show that all the United States legaslative power in the world isn't going to solve the CO2 problem by itself as China is producing twice as much and increasing emissions whereas the US is shrinking emissions. After all this isn't a US only issue this is a world wide issue and although we should do all that lies within our power we should also be cognizant of the fact the US isn't the only nation on Earth and other countries should also be considered in this global climate change issue.
As you point out yourself, emissions by the United States are declining (and, broadly, the trend continued under Trump, indicating this is an economically viable, rather than regulatory, decline), but when you let the largest emitter by far to continue spewing more than 2x the US CO2 into the atmosphere, there's very little we can do about CO2 for the planet as a whole. In fact their 2018 grew at the fastest rate in the preceding six years.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/05/brutal-n...
If we can't even trust the government to tax high-emission industry, who's going to fund CO2 sequestration? Social media?
And who do you think is paying for the research (it isn't just Gates) and going to pay for them to be built? There is no incentive for a private company to build them unless there are carbon taxes that outweigh the cost of these. Do you think people will just build them out of the goodness of their hearts (I'll give you that some definitely will be, but not enough).
> but hey maybe the government will suddenly magically get its act together and things will work out.
And that's why we need to keep pushing. Because this tech won't be developed by itself. It won't be built by itself. There's many ways that can be done, but I honestly don't see one without government involvement (and it doesn't have to just be the US. Other countries who have their act together can build these and do global good).
Of course government intervention is absolutely necessary. Without guaranteed payments it would have been impossible for large scale renewables to start up. The government created the market. And that volume of construction has reduced costs.
Also, China has built more solar and wind power than anyone. And they have an active nuclear program. And their per-capita CO2 emissions are about half that of the USA.
Governments are the most powerful entities on this planet. 22 million people have government jobs in the US, which is 7% of the population. The money spent by the US government in 2019 (including states and local governments) amounts to 7.6 trillion USD [1]. This is 38% of the GDP [2]. If you just focus on the impact that all of the government's office buildings, cars, airplanes, etc. have, you get a huge opportunity for improvements. And of course the government doesn't just don't have influence on its direct business, it can also pass laws to incentivize or even force everyone in the country to become more energy saving. This is nothing that any other company can do.
I understand your frustration that there is little success in getting US congress in particular to pass effective laws that fight climate change, but one shouldn't underestimate the power that the US government holds. Tech is having a hard time when the government is funding oil companies.
[1]: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total [2]: GDP is about 20 billion. I'm not an economist, not sure how comparable the two numbers are.
What I don't get is why fusion research is so underfunded. Let's make it a "going to the moon" or "manhattan project" kind of thing and let's get it done in 10 years. Get all the smartest people under one roof and let them have at it, without any funding constraints. $100B/yr oughtta do it. This will completely upend the world, and solve a lot of the problems we have. With clean, essentially unlimited energy, there's a lot you can do. The US doesn't even have to pay for all of it by itself. I'm sure industrialized countries will all be glad to chip in proportionally to their GDP for a world-saving project of this kind.