R&D in anything to help mitigate climate change is great.

It is likely that "something else" will be discovered along the way, or a new solution taking lessons learned from several other projects will be developed. On a smaller scale, this just happened to us this morning in my company. We are developing a new version of a solution for a product. Someone noted that they had developed a new solution for a different product that we could apply (partly) to the first product. The new solution will be much better than the original product with very little additional R&D.