I think the general consensus is that where it's possible to eliminate emissions, that's much better than emitting and then capturing later, but there are huge disparities across emitters as to how easy that is to do, and there's a likely outcome where getting to net zero (or even net negative) emissions involves eliminating emissions in most industries and then using capture to deal with the laggards.
Getting less abstract: there are no real technological hurdles for eliminating emissions for personal vehicles, and probably-manageable ones for other surface transport (cargo shipping, etc.). Decarbonizing the electric grid has some technological challenges to solve (mostly around intermittency and storage if we go all renewables, or cost if we go mixed renewables and nuclear), but there are reasonably clear paths forward. On the other hand, we really don't know how to do zero-carbon long haul aviation, or concrete production and curing, or aluminum smelting, or trans-oceanic shipping -- maybe portable/modular nuclear could be used for the last two, but it's still pretty pie-in-the-sky. So, maybe in the future we have electric cars but carbon capture for long-haul jets, or something.
(Aside: the recent Bill Gates climate book has a pretty thorough rundown of all the major current emitters and the levels of technological readiness for decarbonizing each.)
Carbon neutral jet fuel exists (synthetic fuels from electrolysis, and/or biofuels), and could be scaled up. The issue is not “can we do this”, it’s “can we justify doing this economically”.
For synthetic fuels: yes, absolutely... but it requires economical carbon capture, which GP was saying we maybe shouldn't invest in, in favor of emissions reductions (and if we want net zero, it'd have to be direct air capture, probably, rather than point source, because in this theoretical future, the coal power plants or whatever are all gone). Anyhow, whether you frame captured-carbon fuels as "you capture carbon and then burn it again so it's neutral" or "you burn it, and then deal with its emissions by capturing it again" is sort of arbitrary, and the latter is basically what I'm already arguing for.
Biofuels seem mostly like a crock, honestly -- the ones we can produce now compete with food for arable land and would do so more aggressively at scale, and the ones that wouldn't do that (algal fuels, maybe cellulosic fuels like switchgrass) still require fundamental R&D to make the economics work. And again: even if they did work, this is a solution where you're burning fuels and emitting carbon, and then remedying by capturing again, this time with plants. So again: it's carbon capture.
Getting less abstract: there are no real technological hurdles for eliminating emissions for personal vehicles, and probably-manageable ones for other surface transport (cargo shipping, etc.). Decarbonizing the electric grid has some technological challenges to solve (mostly around intermittency and storage if we go all renewables, or cost if we go mixed renewables and nuclear), but there are reasonably clear paths forward. On the other hand, we really don't know how to do zero-carbon long haul aviation, or concrete production and curing, or aluminum smelting, or trans-oceanic shipping -- maybe portable/modular nuclear could be used for the last two, but it's still pretty pie-in-the-sky. So, maybe in the future we have electric cars but carbon capture for long-haul jets, or something.
(Aside: the recent Bill Gates climate book has a pretty thorough rundown of all the major current emitters and the levels of technological readiness for decarbonizing each.)