I think Manhattan project efforts are useful when there's a goal where there's a clear engineering hypothesis, i.e. how do we achieve a nuclear chain reaction, or send a rocket to the moon.
But when there's a much much much broader research space to explore, such as methods to capture carbon, I don't think that such focused projects are as useful.
We already have the technology to get completely off of carbon, it's the industrial scale-up that's the issue. At current prices, energy costs would increase no more than 3-4x, at the very very worst, and double in a more likely scenario.
So what we really need is political will to cause the market to make these existing technologies efficient on the industrial scale. We need a stiff carbon price. And we also need a way to incentive pulling carbon out of the air, perhaps direct transfer of the carbon tax to those that are able to securely sequester carbon without the possibility of it escaping into the atmosphere. That way, if somebody wants to burn natural gas, that's fine as long as they also pay the cost of taking the carbon out of the atmosphere at the same time
With those two things, we could be off carbon in a few decades, worldwide, economically efficiently. All it takes is the political will, and the investment of a tiny fraction of our global GDP.
Most of all, we need to never, ever, vote for politicians who deny reality and live in a fantasy land on important issues like this. It's affected an entire political party in the US, and the disease is practically contained within them. They have politicized the science, have led large chunks of the US to believe these lies. And they have a huge persecution/inferiority complex so if you even mention that the Republicans are bad on this issue, they get defensive and dig deeper into their lies. There are a few respectable Republicans on this issue, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they are the exception, and the rest of the Republicans ostracize them them for it.
The technology and science is practically there for a solution, it's the politics that needs fixing right now.
If it were as simple
as you claim, and as critical, why wasn't a carbon tax passed in 2009 when Republicans could not have stopped it? Was it even attempted?
There is hope for international collaboration on this, however. The Paris climate agreement is an excellent step. We can't let it be sabotaged in the US by short-sighted, pandering, lying politicians. Such as those that believe that the Chinese invented the concept of climate change to sabotage us.
The Democrats could barely get a health care bill through in 2009, a health care bill that was based on a Republican plan. Ballooning health care costs were an issue throughout all the 2000s, which nearly everybody agreed needed to be addressed in some manner. The concept of Democrats also being able to also push through a carbon tax at that time is absolutely ludicrous. Try convincing the average Republican that climate change is 1) happening, 2) caused by humans, 3) addressable without destroying the economy. We can't even get broad consensus that there is a problem, much less on a solution.
Despite you ignoring everything I wrote, and repeating a bald and false assertion ("Democrats" are not a monolithic thing, they are a party with a wide diversity of views, and saying they could have enacted whatever they wanted presumes that "they" could have a singular view of what they want), I'll try to answer yet another way.
In this world many people assume that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between two sides, and one side is a mixture of those who accept climate science, and those who continually demonize the science and lie about economic consequences. Suppose the Democrats were 100% in agreement on the climate science and how the problem should be addressed, which obviously they're not. Then in that political world, moderates would assume that the truth lies somewhere between the climate science (in this hypothetical world the Democratic stance) and the official Republican party stance. Meaning that the moderates in the country would think that the Democrats would probably be extreme in their views, just because the Republicans have gone so far in the extreme the other way.
And in reality, Democrats are not a monolithic body, they have a variety of views in how to address the problem, and there are even a handful of Democrats from areas with heavy fossil-fuel industry that pay attention to their campaign contributors rather than the science, which makes this supposed Democratic control.
I'll ask you this: why would not even a handful of Republicans support addressing climate change, enough to make this even a slightly bipartisan issue? Why does it fall entirely on a single political party to come to a solution? Shouldn't this be a non-partisan issue where we come up with a solution that people of multiple political views can support?
But when there's a much much much broader research space to explore, such as methods to capture carbon, I don't think that such focused projects are as useful.
We already have the technology to get completely off of carbon, it's the industrial scale-up that's the issue. At current prices, energy costs would increase no more than 3-4x, at the very very worst, and double in a more likely scenario.
So what we really need is political will to cause the market to make these existing technologies efficient on the industrial scale. We need a stiff carbon price. And we also need a way to incentive pulling carbon out of the air, perhaps direct transfer of the carbon tax to those that are able to securely sequester carbon without the possibility of it escaping into the atmosphere. That way, if somebody wants to burn natural gas, that's fine as long as they also pay the cost of taking the carbon out of the atmosphere at the same time
With those two things, we could be off carbon in a few decades, worldwide, economically efficiently. All it takes is the political will, and the investment of a tiny fraction of our global GDP.
Most of all, we need to never, ever, vote for politicians who deny reality and live in a fantasy land on important issues like this. It's affected an entire political party in the US, and the disease is practically contained within them. They have politicized the science, have led large chunks of the US to believe these lies. And they have a huge persecution/inferiority complex so if you even mention that the Republicans are bad on this issue, they get defensive and dig deeper into their lies. There are a few respectable Republicans on this issue, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they are the exception, and the rest of the Republicans ostracize them them for it.
The technology and science is practically there for a solution, it's the politics that needs fixing right now.