Earlier quoted context omitted.
As one example, imagine that someone invents a process to manufacture gasoline using carbon extracted from the air, at a price that's cost competitive with gasoline extracted from the ground. Any car running on that as fuel would immediately become carbon-neutral, and it could be produced anywhere on the planet. Almost overnight you could make the entire automotive industry carbon neutral (burning this gasoline would…
Sure, that would be great. Processes to do this exist - at higher energy costs. The thermodynamic hill is heavily against you on this. Cheap fusion or safe cheap thorium reactors would also be great. But an awful lot of smart people have bounced off those problems without success.
Thermodynamics isn't the only thing to consider. There are parts of the world where spot electricity rates routinely go negative, because it's cheaper to pay a consumer to absorb excess electricity than it is to shut off a power plant. A process like this could absorb excess electricity when there's an excess of electricity.
You don't need to talk about fusion or thorium reactors when the cost of solar is low and falling, and we haven't _nearly_ saturated the planets capacity for generating electricity through solar. A combined facility that generated electricity through solar, then either sold electricity or manufactured gasoline (whichever is better in the moment)