All of that is assuming we don't make major advances in carbon/methane capture and maybe some sort of "ice capture" plan, of course.
I don't know how much hope we have to actually see major advances in these areas, but given what we all expect of how much pressure we will be in collectively I can imagine a lot more money being thrown at is as people get desperate.
Carbon capture and sequestration, as it's called, suffers from a major co-ordination problem, the free-rider effect. Why pay yourself if others are paying? You get the same benefit. Every country can see that, so no-one pays.
Look how well the world did with covid-19. Low income countries are still desperately short of vaccines, which means that covid is going to be endemic from now on.
Or look how well the world coped when there were commodity food price spikes in 2005-2008, and 2010-2011. Countries banned exports, rather than co-operating.
We're going to have more of those (food price spikes), btw.
Something that has been vanishingly low probability (once per 5_000 years, say), until now, is simultaneous harvest failure by say 10% or more in two or more of the four "bread-basket" (grain) regions of the world.
Simulations suggest that probability will rise over the course of the century to about 50% per decade starting in the '40s.[1] I hope we're planning for it.
1. Daniel Quiggin, Kris De Meyer, Lucy Hubble-Rose and Anthony Froggatt, Climate change risk assessment 2021, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House Environment and Society Programme Research Paper 2021. ISBN 978-1-78413-491-4.
The Musk solution is limited to transport, where emissions can be reduced economically. Other emissions sources, such as steel production, will not be solved with the same mechanism, because no single company is going to suffer the competitive disadvantage of using clean tech.
Sucking carbon out of the atmosphere yourself will never be cheaper than letting other people do it, no matter what Elon's R&D departments do. We can't reach our climate coals without it.
If people are already buying something, like electricity or cars, then buying clean substitutes that are cheaper and better than older dirty products doesn't suffer from free rider effect.
Each person makes their own decision and gets more value with the clean option if it is better than the old product at what it does. The clean option takes over automatically thanks to individuals each looking out for themselves.
I used Musk's name as a short-hand for this approach targeting individual self interest because he has a very high profile in cleaner transport in the US. I did not mean to imply that Musk will somehow make CCS a desirable thing for individuals to buy. That's not possible.
Sucking carbon out of the atmosphere is not something that people get individual value from, or have been willing to pay for to date. So left to themselves, no-one would pay for it. That's why it needs co-ordinated action. Which we're not good at.
Yes, we can't reach climate goals without CCS. But it's going to be hard to scale up to approximately the same size as the global oil and gas industry.
Direct Air Capture (DAC) will never be impactful for the simple reason that you need to process way too much air to remove an appreciable amount of Carbon. Capture at the source of plants producing CO2 will be helpful, but DAC is a pipe dream.
I don't know how much hope we have to actually see major advances in these areas, but given what we all expect of how much pressure we will be in collectively I can imagine a lot more money being thrown at is as people get desperate.