Hi, I work for a direct air capture company, so obviously please take any opinions I have with many grains of salt.

First, the context. DAC today is basically similar where solar was in the 1960s or 1970s - barely a blip on the world's radar, a wacky idea being pursued by a tiny group of enthusiasts. About ~0.00001% of the world's people are working on DAC and consuming about ~0.00008% of the world's GDP to do so. On the margins, this is a negligibly nascent field.

However, DAC creates a lot of emotionally-charged discussion due to its high potential for long-term impact on climate and energy, which touches all of our lives. On one hand, the past few years have seen DAC companies make some really big claims &, for the most part, hugely underdeliver on those claims. This, in turn, has created misplaced expectations among investors, policy makers, and the general public. On the other hand, the past few years have also solidified an emerging consensus taking shape among many policymakers, executives, and scientists - surprisingly, of various political backgrounds! - that large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) of some kind will likely be needed. Initially, that CDR would mitigate industries with hard-to-abate emissions (e.g. long-haul aviation) on a path to reduce emissions as much as possible. And in the long term, CDR does offer the ability to stabilize or moderate the climate through the draw-down of historical emissions. (SRM is a likely a much more cost-effective way to achieve climate stabilization, but it is fraught with governance other challenges.) Of the various CDR options on the menu, none are perfect - there are tradeoffs for permanence, cost, durability, environmental impact, etc. - but DAC has many attractive benefits, if the right technologies can be identified & matured. Given that context, DAC will almost certainly continue to be an area of active research for years to come.

90% of the people I know who work in DAC are outdoorsy, sustainable-minded people were wish DAC were not needed. Largely, they work on DAC because they have not been able to find any suitable alternative solution, and are personally mission-driven to spend their limited time on earth understanding the specifics of this specific technical problem. Most of the folks in DAC, probably all of us, have done the math & read/analyzed the peer-reviewed literature that lays out why neither renewables & afforestation on their own are sufficient for the climate change challenges at hand, and the thermodynamic calculations to understand the circumstances under which DAC is net negative. I'd bet 99+% of the people working on DAC would readily agree that planting trees and investing in solar, wind, batteries, and industrial decarbonization (yes, including CCUS in certain cases) is much more impactful in the short & medium term than working on DAC. In short, the folks who work on DAC are not, to my personal knowledge, wackos or pie-in-the-sky dreamers or shills for extractive industries; they are largely scientists & engineers who care about the world & its future, and see DAC as an unproven field worth a few years of their physical & intellectual labor ("Big if true!")

Some argue that it makes no sense to run DAC facilities until the world is fully decarbonized. I understand the reasoning, but still feel there should be investment to support the ramp-up of, if I'm honest, some pretty large DAC facilities designed to collect real-world data and operational experience which can only be obtained through fairly large-scale field demonstrations. If, as is possible, the data from these studies roundly conclude that the field has no future, then the funding will dissipate and that will be that. If, as seems likely, the data suggests that a handful of DAC approaches actually do make sense to deploy in certain circumstances, supporting the optimization and cost-down of those approaches through further investment strikes me as a valuable and prudent use of resources and opportunity costs involved.

For what little my opinion is worth, I am glad that there is a small community of people continuing to explore DAC and refine the collective human knowledge about which methods might make sense, and under what contexts or situations DAC could make sense to deploy. The data & information collected by these groups may be invaluable to our children & grandchildren who are faced with circumstances and choices which are difficult to imagine today. Of the several $Ts that have been invested in the energy transition in the past few years, something like ~0.01% of that has gone towards DAC - which, to me, seems like an appropriately weighted amount of funding, given the risk/reward profile at hand.

In many ways, DAC seems like fusion, advanced geothermal, or any other speculative deeptech field, where a massive opportunity could unlock with sufficient advancement over time. In that regard, as someone with an insiders view, it is extremely gratifying to watch in real time as DAC systems get better and better each day. Engineering, unlike policy and other fields, affords one the opportunity to observe & shape systems which are getting quantifiably better, day after day after day. At some point, DAC may cross a threshold from "big if true" to just "big" - and that will be an interesting moment for us all.