The world had a big win in the past few weeks with the passing of the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Despite the compromises with Joe Manchin to get the legislation passed, the consensus is that it will jump start an erstwhile recalcitrant US back into the league of nations dedicated to fight global warming.

Among other climate commitments, the IRA promises to increase the subsidy for every tonne of CO² that’s captured from the atmosphere and safely stored, in the ground or wherever.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technology we in Australia have heard quite a bit about. The problem is, it’s usually dismissed out-of-hand by environmentalist as a sop to the miners and a massive waste of public money.

The premise of environmental objections to CCS is that it’s most often discussed as gadgetry that’s retrofitted to coal-powered electricity plants and the like and which would allow them to chug-along just fine until the resource runs-out, at which point they abandon the place and leave their workforce to their fate.

Worse again, at least in Australia, CCS research is funded via great buckets of government money, and that’s for a technology so far that’s way too expensive to run and captures way too little carbon.

Various CCS trials are taking place around the world, but the one, small-scale plant that’s operating successful is in Iceland, at a place of uniquely favourable geology.

Still, as a concept, CCS will have to become an essential feature of our climate adaptation suite of solutions.

After all, if it succeeds, CCS is the one technology that promises to get rid of the gunk that’s already in the atmosphere and is already causing disastrous climate change. Ask anybody in Pakistan or London or dozens of other disaster zones if they believe climate change is real and has already arrived.

But is there a smart way we can employ CCS that works, and that doesn’t leave us captured by the energy-industry cabal?

A few months ago, we listened to a presentation by Tim Flannery and his promotion of giant ocean-based kelp farms to absorb mega-tonnes of greenhouse gases.

In this video by the excellent Dave Borlace, we look at an alternative, plant-based CCS scheme. The difference here is that instead of the carbon ending up on the ocean floor, it gets buried in the desert.

Just how well this technology stacks up against the criteria that Dave lists to judge its success – verifiable, measurable, permanent, additive (not a process that happens anyway), scalable, affordable – remains unanswered, but surely the more important point about this and other prospective climate fixes is that the most onerous boundary we need to cross is the limit of our imagination.