With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?
Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.
I get the worries, Lithium mining causes ecological damage, but every sort of resource extraction causes ecological damage. Every kilogram of pollution generated from lithium mining prevents many times more pollution generated from oil extraction and emissions. Lithium, cobalt, and the rest aren't exotic materials, the battery industry is huge and has many decades of experience building batteries.
Synthesizing hydrocarbons is an important technology. But that process is incredibly energy intensive, and it's much more efficient to use electricity to just charge a battery. The scale of production of synthetic hydrocarbons isn't anywhere close to where it would need to be to make a dent in climate change. I think that electrofuels will be very important in aviation - they're the only apparent pathway to run jet engines without emissions. But it will be a long time, if ever, before that technology is mature enough to fuel passenger vehicles at a meaningful scale.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
[2] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
The batteries in electric vehicles are a storage technology, so all you have to do is charge your car while the sun shines. If you need the batteries anyway it makes much more sense to put them there so you can also stop burning gasoline.
You need to replace fossil fuels with <whatever you think is the solution>. If you are convinced that solar + batteries can do it, then you need to rethink about orders of magnitudes.
Even nuclear cannot reasonably replace fossil fuels in the timeline that we need (i.e. before global instability that may well slow down many things). Solar is far behind.
Also never forget that we are living a mass extinction right now (it is happening, it is a measurable fact), and that is solely due to human activity in a world with abundant energy. If you find a solution to replace fossil fuels, you may save what remains to be saved on the climate front, but you will finish killing biodiversity. I don't know about you, but that is catastrophic to me.
Conclusion: we need to use much less energy, and therefore we need to be more minimalistic and stop growing just for the sake of growing. It's called "degrowth", but some people don't like that word because they think it means "go back to Middle Age". Instead it just means: engineers (like everybody else) need to work hard on clever solutions that rely less on energy. That's not Middle Age, it's just not the Silicon Valley world.
Your thinking is that we can't build solar panels and nuclear reactors fast enough, but we can build housing fast enough to move a significant fraction of the population to higher density areas where they don't have to drive as much? Because that's the low-hanging fruit on energy consumption, and it's a massive scale long-term construction project with significant political opposition.
And we should still do it, if only to get housing prices out of crazyland. But what makes you think we can do it any faster than we can build generation capacity?
I guess my point generally is that it is super hard to solve, because it touches everything. But it seems clear that we won't be able to compensate for fossil energy in the needed timeline. For nuclear plants, because it's super slow to build. For solar/wind, well we can't control them (if there is no sun, you get no photovoltaic energy) and we can't properly stock the energy they produce. And in any way, changing everything everywhere to work with electricity instead of fossil fuels is super hard, time consuming, and won't work for everything (oil is used for everything, not just cars).
So yeah, it's super challenging, it requires a lot of work and care everywhere. But the first step is to accept that we can't solve the problem by throwing more technology to it. We need to use technology wisely to get as much energy as we can, but in any case we have to drastically reduce our consumption, and therefore change society.