It's amazing to me the impact they seem to be having with...a few million? With all the VC money getting thrown around these days you'd think some of it would get tossed towards unproven climate change solutions.
1. A government, any government, puts aside about €500 million.
2. Anyone who can submit a proposal, and anyone with a decent enough plan and a convincing group of people to execute it gets €250k. Total budget for this phase is €50 million, so this funds 200 ideas.
3. If ANY measurable progress has been made once the money runs out, your group gets another €500k. Expect 50% of the companies of step 2 to fail. Total budget for this phase is again €50 million, for (now) 100 ideas.
4. If the money from 2. or 3. turns out to be spent maliciously, the government will haunt you to get you to pay it back (there are existing protocols in place to deal with this).
5. If the money from 3. runs out, there is a go/no-go decision. In case of "go", you get €2 to €5 million to really have a go at it and build the real thing. In case of "no go", it stops here. You are obviously free to take your idea and try to find other investors for it. Weeds out (say) 50%, so now left at 50 ideas - total budget about €175 million.
6. For the companies that get the "go" in step 5, observe their performance. If it's promising, give them another €10 million. Again you probably only fund 50%, so that's 25 ideas for about €250 million.
7. Profit.
Tada, a working process that probably gets your country a fairly large number of actually competitive companies that can end up employing thousands of people and at the same time help save the planet.
Germany could run a competition like this for €6 per person. The EU could fund it for €1 per person. Heck, even the city of New York could fund it for the low, low, price of €20 per person. This is eminently doable.
The applicants form a consortium, usually a heavy hitter followed by some universities and smaller firms. They usually promise something that they are already working on in the context of a thematic package that the ministry puts up for grabs. The research is usually done by the university, while the large company moves the money around citing 'management' workloads. The small companies don't really do much, or present past results as cutting edge R&D.
To your number 4, you forget that all systems involve people, and in the small world model everybody in the industry kind of knows each other. It's very easy to wine&dine, then show some fancy demos to scruffy suits in Brussels and get away with doing absolutely nothing at all.
In my personal opinion this is more or less a consequence of all innovative and intelligent people going to work at FAANG for ads and whatnot, the rest of them being locked in the politics of academia.
This is basically ARPA-E: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/faqs/general-questions. I've written a bunch of these, and they're more straightforward than many federal applications.
https://www.petaluma360.com/article/news/petaluma-earns-1m-g...
As well this direct air capture is slightly better than CCS (read: pretty bad) but is also a red herring in terms of climate solutions that will provide a lot of value. I say this because large amounts of money will get diverted into this kind of investment that hasn't proved to be particularly successful but has an easy to understand narrative.
Can you elaborate on this assertion?
That and there are way too many people who are now building carbon accounting software and the benefits that will accrue to it (similar to greenwashing). If only we could get some people to work in areas where there was real world impact instead of LP returns :)
Normally, governments would invest those few millions. But government spending seems to have become almost completely broken recently and isn't generating that kind of result anymore.
We cannot physically replicate the Azolla Event or the Carboniferous Period. There's no better form of carbon storage than coal, gas, oil. And it needs to just stay in the ground.
Otherwise I guess if we're looking at terraforming, we should consider iron fertilization.