It's counterproductive in the sense that you'd be guaranteed to reduce carbon emissions more (globally) if you were to instead just not burn fossil fuels at all

It's counterproductive in the sense that you'd be guaranteed to reduce carbon emissions more (globally) if you were to instead just not burn fossil fuels at all. If you took the solar cell part and just used that electricity to displace carbon fueled power plants, you'd end up ahead. That said, for a little while at least, having liquid fuels is inherently given a bonus relative to electricity only. Of course, you can just make those from the original fossil fuel sources as well... Honestly it seems like a bit of a mess since each team solving problems locally rarely has all the expertise needed to see the impact globally. I certainly don't, though I've been studying it for many years. I very much appreciate that things like the CA-GREET models have been trying hard to make it easier to apply wide systems analysis expertise to understand a small part of the overall system without spending years doing the math. But probably it will end up needing to be solved by AlphaGo...