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Carbon capture is different than direct air capture. Carbon capture just means catching the CO2 emissions at the source of those emissions, not pulling directly from the air.

The big thing is that there's no reason to be building new fossil fuel facilities right now, regardless of their emissions, just because of the costs.

Solar is already vastly cheaper and wind is already highly competitive - and if any technology needs help getting down the learning curve it's wind. If wind gets as cheap as solar the duck curve is just not a problem anymore - and wind turbines are a highly modular commodity install that we have every reason to think are capable of getting that cheap. Between the two of them you can basically meet future energy needs along with grid upgrades/enhancements. And you'll have a less centralized and more resilient network while you're at it.

Meanwhile affordable industrial heat storage companies - hot rocks guys - and other medium-term energy storing technologies are springing up by then minute. It's a potentially lucrative field because if you can store extremely cheap renewable energy and then sell it to the grid in lieu of very expensive fossil energy you can make a killing. With every moment the need for these callable energy sources like natural gas is diminishing.

To put it simply, existing technology already on the roadmap that we can be fairly sure is going to be delivered it's already capable of getting us beyond the need for fossil fuels, and making energy less expensive for the consumer in the process.

Carbon capture is predicated on the idea that we're going to keep building fossil energy production facilities, but the new ones will be outfitted such that they aren't going to produce CO2 emissions. It just doesn't make sense even economically. We're building extremely expensive versions of already-too-expensive facilities in order to make use of a resource that we know we should simply not be making significant use of.

The only way carbon capture makes sense is if you have fossil fuel resources that you want to extract and sell - that is, if you're a petrostate or oil company. But it doesn't make any economic sense for the consumer of that energy because carbon-captured fossil fuels may never be possible and even if they are will be incredibly expensive per joule.

As you were hinting, it's well time we're pulling the subsidies out from under these fossil fuel companies. The market is already prepared to crush them if we stop propping them up.