While in no way am I a subscriber to man-made global warming through excess production of plant-food, otherwise known as Carbon Dioxide, cool technology could actually come out of all of this money we're spending on trying to limit its outgassing into the atmosphere.
Researchers have found a cheap Copper Oxide/Tin Oxide catalyst stable enough to reduce CO2 to CO and Oxygen within a solar cell matrix.
Here's the link:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170605110809.htm
Being able to make a catalyst out of common metals like Copper and Tin as opposed to Gold, Platinum or Ruthenium drastically lowers cost and potential for commercialization of the technology. 13% thermal efficiency is low, but as a starting point for the research, its outstanding.
It took the solar industry decades to achieve 13% thermal conversion. Current solar cells are running in the low 20's.
The problem with a lot of these technologies, unfortunately, is that their development and funding were based on poor assumptions. The first was Peak Oil, which is a joke. And the second is the effect CO2 has on the environment. Both of these ideas were given outrageous support by governments, who misallocated capital to them in the hope of solving problems that weren't needed.
Peak oil theory contributed to the scare-mongering that allowed oil prices to rise to $125 per barrel. This spurred massive investment into alternatives, which is fantastic, but it also took capital away from other areas of the economy that needed to be attention. Those resources were bid away thanks to government meddling in the normal response to high prices.
Now, promising technologies will have to wait even longer for adoption because there is so much oil and gas being found, because Peak Oil is stupid, that oil prices aren't likely to rise above $55 in constant dollars for the next two decades.
So, much of that research will lay dormant because of economic booms and busts created by artificially manipulating prices for political means. But, its development will also ensure that oil and gas remains relatively cheap for a long time.
