Climate activists are struggling with demonstrating they do not personally cause a lot of CO2 emissions. It is not easy to live in a modern city, using the internet, not having your own land to grow stuff, working in a job that hardly pays attention to its climate effect, to be ‘neutral’. The reality is though that it doesn’t even make sense to require it. Does a baker eat all the bread he tries to sell, does a doctor take all the medicine he prescribes, does a surgeon operate on himself? You don’t always have to follow the rules you advocate yourself.
To me it looks like people miss an important aspect of climate change, which is its duality. There are two timescales at which things happen, and both need to be addressed, but you can ignore your personal emissions as long as you do. This is because the CO2 has to spread out through the atmosphere and then stays there for a long time. The best way to imagine that is to think of dropping ink in a swimming pool. Throwing it in is easy, getting it out once diluted is impossible.
The CO2 that was put into the atmosphere in the past will spread out and become more effective in absorbing IR radiation and causing a warmer climate over time. If we would stop emitting today temperatures would keep going up for decades. Then there’s also feedback effects (most prominently visible forrest fires). So you can say that climate action is useless. That is if you hope to see CO2 stall or drop any time soon. Of course it is NOT useless, the result just takes more time to materialize.
The duality is that although we won’t see much effect, we still have to rigorously cut emissions as fast as we can. The tiny amount added by people who make this happen is irrelevant.
The average temperature on Earth is directly linked to the CO2 concentration so to get it back to livable levels (where life can thrive), we need to recapture CO2. This can take thousands of years because the CO2 is diluted and it takes energy to separate it out and energy to convert it in to something that does not cause a greenhouse effect.
The process of CO2 capture is a problem if it could work in our economy, because it would effectively be an energy source the economy is very capable of putting to use. Banks would want to trade it. It would also compete with fossil and nuclear and renewables, so it would not be really welcome and it would not be permanent. This is why I suggest CO2 capture and conversion to fuels or plastics or some permanent form has to happen outside our economy (extraeconomically).
The question is : Will we survive the time average temperatures will keep going up, will people be able to focus on the capture of CO2 or will chaos and famines engulf the world to the point where nobody has any idea its even possible to fix things. Nature is not going to. We have to.