The process works like this:
1). Scale up renewable energy so that we're collecting gads of gigawatts of solar & wind power.
2). Isolate CO2 from the atmosphere.
3). Use this chemical process, which is CO2 + energy = ethanol.
4). Store the ethanol.
From there, we can either just store the ethanol--thereby reducing the atmosphere's CO2, and causing man-made REVERSAL of global warming--or we can export and burn the ethanol--which is a carbon-neutral operation.
Ethanol provides an excellent replacement for lithium batteries, which commonly are used to store excess renewable energy in periods of excess supply (e.g. high winds). This is one of the roadblocks inhibiting renewable energy from scaling: because frequently solar or wind energy is just lost because it can't be stored. Further, this lets us scale up massive wind farms or solar arrays in remote areas, without figuring out how to transfer the power to the grid (whom may not even want it at the moment). You simply set up a wind farm in the Alaskan tundra, Alaskan pipeline the ethanol down to Valdez, and export it. That is actually a carbon negative operation, until (and if) the ethanol is consumed. Offshore oil rigs--even those out of commission--get lots of wind.
We've got a few decades to figure this out, but this looks good.