In May 2019, I flew to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to attend a conference on the future of carbon capture, the technology the oil industry was betting on to slash the climate impact of burning fossil fuels. Just six months after the release of a dire report giving humanity roughly a decade to halve emissions that were then still growing year over year, I braced myself for what I expected to be a roomful of unreformed climate deniers.

Instead, I spent most of two days listening to conversations detailing the surprisingly complex reality: technologies to keep carbon from leaving smokestacks and entering the atmosphere could actually work.

In particular, I heard Akshat Rathi, an Oxford-trained chemist and journalist, chat at length with Julio Friedmann, a former Department of Energy official-turned-academic now working to help commercialize the carbon capture tools he spent decades honing with federal research dollars. Rathi, who had written an acclaimed investigative series on the subject for Quartz, spoke of the actual science and hardware behind carbon capture painting a broader picture that challenged many environmentalists blanket condemnation of the technology as a false solution.

From reading emissions studies and talking to modelers, it seemed obvious to me that the U.S. could not hit its emissions targets simply by strapping carbon capture equipment to aging coal plants. And I was sure that fossil fuel companies were dangling the technologys still-unmet potential in front of policymakers to distract them from more promising solutions. But listening to Rathi and Friedmann made me realize how unlikely the U.S. is to meet its goals without carbon capture technology. Its hard to see how wed slash enough planet-heating pollution from heavy industry and other applications that cant yet easily be swapped out for solar panels or batteries.

Moreover, the tools now used to capture CO2 at the source could lay the groundwork for the next generation of carbon capture tech: machines to essentially vacuum emissions out of the sky and bury them back underground.

Rewiring the global economy to run on different sources of energy will be no easy task, to put it mildly. And well need to do it while continuing to expand access to electricity to the nearly 800 million people who still dont have it, improving the grid for the billions more who lack steady supplies and maintaining quality of life in places where fossil fuels have long kept the lights on. Carbon capture could be a big part of that.

Yet the loudest advocate for using carbon capture was a U.S. president who appeared clueless about how the technology worked and dismissed the need to cut emissions at all.

Donald Trump was campaigning on clean coal, Rathi recalled in an hour-long conversation over Zoom earlier this month. Its just that he doesnt understand it. Trump used to say, You take the coal, you clean it and then you burn it. Instead, theres carbon capture technology, where you take the coal, you burn it, then maybe you capture some of its emissions.

Carbon capture makes up just one part of Climate Capitalism, Rathis 199-page debut, in which each chapter profiles a different executive, scientist or engineer making progress on solutions to cut emissions that could be applied worldwide.

Rathi, now a senior reporter on Bloombergs climate desk and the host of its climate-focused Zero podcast, is an able guide for a globe-spanning narrative that elevates familiar and at-times controversial names like Bill Gates (the billionaire) alongside those of Chinas battery king, Zeng Yuqun (the winner) and an Indian farmer known only as Srinivas (the doer) whose decision to lease land to a solar company broke a cycle of generational poverty. Friedmann is the wrangler of the story.

The title is primed for blowback from those who say the only pathway to keeping the Earth habitable for humans is to eliminate capitalism altogether and transition to an economic system that wastes fewer resources. Rathi expects as much. The hip Marxist publisher Verso Books released academic Brett Christophers The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Wont Save The Planet just a month before Rathis book came out, and the two are ripe for comparison.

Rathi shares many critiques of the type of financialized laissez-faire form of capitalism that triumphed after the Cold War with his own critics on the left. But he points out that even leftist Noam Chomsky recognizes theres not enough time to rewire the entire global economy to use far less fossil fuel and to peacefully reorder the rest of human society.

HuffPost spoke with Rathi this month about Western perceptions of economic growth, the evolution of climate denialism and what the climate crisis means for democracy. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A lot of environmentalists blame climate change on capitalism, and frame the system as the cause of the problem. At the same time, obviously, we dont have very much time to construct a whole new global economic system and decarbonize. Can you talk about the title of your book?

The original title, at least in my proposal to the publisher, was The Existential Economy. Again, there was alliteration there. But both words are perhaps too big and too boring to have stuck around on the cover of a book. The publisher was like, Look, I enjoy this book, but I think you are making the case for capitalism being part of the solution here. Why dont you just say it? Im like, Fair enough. I mean, the solutions that Ive looked at around the world are being deployed in the capitalistic economy. They are changing capitalism, though, to make it work because the existing form of free or free-er markets has not been working. What youre seeing around the world, in different ways, is bringing in more regulation. It is bringing in more direction. It is governments finding their own ability to try and shape the transition [in ways] that they had forgotten they had.

The U.S. does it through supercharging tax credits. The EU does it through a lot of bureaucratic rules around how to invest in green solutions. China does it through creating national champions and eventually export payments. In all those forms, there is a clear, capitalistic economy that has been reshaped for climate solutions. As I started reporting, the title is something we kept working on for a year or so. But the more I reported it, it felt right to be able to call it Climate Capitalism, and to be going on the road and defending that title. We spent a lot of time thinking, will I be able to explain to people what I mean when I say climate capitalism? And, yeah, I feel like its fair enough. Given the time we have left, we should look at whats working and how to make it work better and work in other places, too.