> Climate policy is essential to the engineering work of decarbonization, as it can make the costs of new energy technologies plummet and shift markets to low-c

> Climate policy is essential to the engineering work of decarbonization, as it can make the costs of new energy technologies plummet and shift markets to low-carbon alternatives. People often underestimate how much human ingenuity can be unleashed when it’s propelled by market forces. Propelled by market forces and by policy forces. Policy can provide a temporary push to get technology over a hump of development costs and scale up, but it's a really hard social problem to maintain in the long term. The real challenge for engineers is to build an eco-friendly technology that's cheaper and more desirable than the alternative; in that state it can basically free-fall forever under the push of market forces. Why would you drive a gas guzzling, high-maintenance old car when a Tesla has lower lifetime costs? Why would you run a noisy, smelly generator outside your camper van when you could put silent solar panels on the roof? Why would an energy company burn coal when a wind farm puts out more energy for less money? When new tech is both more desirable for the end user and for the planet, that's when it really takes off. I think the fundamental question we need to ask is what technology could be developed that would lead to market forces pushing carbon sequestration. Even if forward-thinking governments work together to develop sequestration-pushing policies, amoral actors will be perpetually incentivized to defect. You can't win that fight forever. > Making 1 tonne of cement lime releases about 1 tonne of CO2. If all the CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing were captured and pumped underground at a cost of $80 per tonne, we estimate that a 50-pound bag (about 23 kg) of concrete mix, one component of which is cement, will cost about 42 cents more. Such a price change would not stop people from using concrete nor significantly add to building costs. But it will perpetually cost more than a bag from an unscrupulous manufacturer; the economic incentive is to reduce that amount. Also, a 50 lbs concrete bag only costs about $2.50, so $0.42 is still a significant fraction...and at non-homeowner usage rates of an 8-yard/32,000 lbs truck with a cost of about $1,200, that's a nontrivial price jump of $270. People will still use it, sure, but they're not going to be happy about it. Instead (or in addition), we need some kind of industrial-scale technology that makes people want to pull CO2 from the air and put it in the ground.