This has been one of the inherent problems with any kind of carbon removal — there’s no real way to profit from it, so it was unlikely to happen at scale bigger than a PR operation unless government either pays for it or requires firms to pay for it.
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The cost of carbon capture should be passed on to the producers of carbon. That’s the fastest way to get them to stop.
The trouble is, we’re too afraid to regulate businesses out of business.
This is entirely the point of a cap and trade system. Let the market duke it out over the best path to zero, ratcheting down the amount of credits on the market, so everyone can decide whether to focus on reducing or removing.
Anyone with a modicum of critical thinking can realize that this is a ploy by and for fossil fuel companies to cling to their social license to keep polluting until they’re gone. All we need to do is make polluting less profitable. The means of doing so are left as an exercise for the reader’s imagination.
What’s wrong with trees? They cost next to nothing and runs on renewable energy.
Large-scale tree planting can remove some CO2 from the atmosphere, but nowhere near as much as humans add by extracting and burning fossil fuels. See https://skepticalscience.com/1-trillion-trees-impact.html for a detailed assessment of what this looks like.
You are on to the issue yourself. First and foremost we need to stop releasing CO2. That in and of itself is not enough, but the most important bit. Some countries (a lot?) has enough tree cover to offset a huge chunk of their CO2 emissions today by trees. Some might even be CO2 neutral, had it not been for the use of wood for fuel. Therein lies the potential. And this is already a mature industry with market dependencies well established.
Resembling this CO2 uptake with man made processes will require a monumental investment in both monetary and energy terms and the output will be pitiful when the net effect is calculated.
So slamming the effect of trees, which does not require any of that development and investment costs because it doesn’t solve the entire problem, because it isn’t a silver bullet is rather short sighted. It is already today the best tool we have to sequester carbon from the atmosphere for cheap and with a comoditiezed biproduct.