We do. But it's so much easier to not pump carbon up, than to use tons of energy to put carbon back in the ground. Even if you'd use carbon free energy, for a long time coming that energy can offset existing fossil energy...
Most importantly, it's not certain that runaway warming can't happen even at our current temperature. Methane is being released from permafrost at our current levels of warming and is 20x as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Also, our natural carbon sinks (the ocean, macroalgae, forests, soil) are in decline whether or not we stop emitting CO2 - so CO2 may keep going up anyway as we lose biomass.
And let's be honest with ourselves here, we're not cutting emissions to 0 tomorrow. Or next year. Or by 2030. Or by 2050 most likely.
We have to reduce emissions, at a level that seems inconceivable. We ALSO have to pull CO2 back out, again, at a level that seems inconceivable. The ability to scale up CO2 removal to a planetary scale requires that we accelerate development right now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
A byproduct of increased atmospheric CO2 levels is an increase in vegetative growth. My naive assumption is that more plant mass means more food and habitat for insects.
We've created a world that is vastly different in climate than what came before. This is the problem with the climate crisis in general, all our ecosystems are in the wrong places
Can't speak to Taiga, but trees are growing just fine in California. Overgrowth of trees creating fuel for fires is as much a problem as anything.
Once you get to the hardest marginal cases, I’m not actually sure what the most efficient way of offsetting the carbon emissions of airplanes is. It might actually be more efficient to just capture and sequester enough CO2 to offset the emissions of jet engines than to find a new energy source that works on airplanes.
Hell, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that certain superpowers (namely Russia) decide that climate change is actually in their long term interest, as it devastates regions near the equator and opens up currently difficult to tap resources in their own.
Slowing down carbon emission is definitely worth pursuing as much as possible, if for no other reason than it buys us time to solve the problem. But I doubt we'll ever get to a safe steady state until all the fossil fuel has been converted into a format that can't be burned.
wouldn't it be cheaper to buy fossil fuels on the open market, somehow convert it to a non-harmful form (eg. pure carbon) and then dump it in the ocean?
The simple answer might be that you'd still have to burn it, but immediately convert the exhaust to a stable solid. I'm unaware if this conversion can be done with less energy than can be extracted from burning it.
If there's still demand then the market will spur more development and exploration. It turns there's a lot of oil in the world, the fracking revolution in the US proved that. It would take $Ts to make a dent. And it wouldn't even work, as most oil reserves are held by national governments, who would thank you for raising the price of oil.
But let's suppose you did spend $Ts to shut in specific wells. You've spend all that money and gotten no economic benefit, except for other fossil fuel producers. If you had instead spent those $Ts on encouraging the deployment of fossil fuel free transportation and industrial processes you would destroy demand for that oil and (hopefully) leave it in the ground because its not economic to take it out.
I just came up with a funny scheme. Each person submits a bid saying "I'd like to receive X dollars per 1MT increase in net daily emissions, and I'm willing to pay the same sum per 1MT decrease". The tricky part is paying for second derivative: not CO2 concentration, not emissions, but change in emissions. Then as the emissions actually happen, they get tallied up by the government, an average "price per 1MT increase" gets determined, and emitters are forced to pay that price, so everyone gets paid (or pays) exactly as they asked. If carbon capture also happens, then carbon capture companies also get paid, either by emitters if there's a net increase, or from people's stated bids if there's a net decrease.
This seems weird at first, what if everyone submits million-dollar bids? Well, then emitters reduce emissions for a short time and take everyone's money. On the other hand, what if everyone submits zero? Then emitters keep increasing emissions, and everyone misses out on being paid. So there's some optimal bid in between. Anyone who wants emissions to go down just submits a larger bid.
But what do we do next when we're running out of these low hanging goals? It's more of death by a thousand cuts spanning across every industries you can ever imagine. And we've had a long, hard time to make politics work even on a very few number of those obvious low hanging fruits and it's still dysfunctional... Political will is a limited resource and we cannot really waste them on efforts with negligible impacts.
This is why we need to prepare more general and economically scalable solutions that directly deal with carbon emission itself. Keep in mind that we're not trying to handle all of carbon emission problems with carbon capture. It's more of an auxiliary one on top of highly optimized carbon reduction solutions.
Housing insulation retrofits next, and then metro-area roading and zoning reform to heavily encourage walking, with neighborhood shops, cafes, and communal spaces every few streets, and public transport to get between neighborhoods.
The first hangs lower than restructuring built-up areas, true. The second has great public health benefits though.
But I agree about political will. The political way to deal with climate change is not in policy documents, it's to produce policy documents.