In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want, a systemic problem that we seem to struggle to solve. A country’s pollution is approximately proportional to its wealth. To fix the problem requires huge changes to our individual wealth.
Few individuals want to make the required changes: individually we buy into cheap denial narratives, green-washing. No democracy can act as a benevolent dictator to force us to make the radical changes required to our priorities, our wants and needs. The majority of us are sold on deception, because we want to buy into the deception.
Edit: a few simple assumptions means for a me to capture my carbon with trees, I need to plant ≈1 Hectare (4 acres) of trees, and never harvest the trees. I do intend to do it (it will mean some belt tightening), but it doesn’t address the problem of removing my past CO2 emissions, and would use up 20% of New Zealand’s land to do it if all 5 million of us wanted to. “New Zealand has a total of 10.1 million hectares of forests, covering 38% of the land. 2.1 million hectares are plantation forest.”. “The yearly carbon dioxide balancing rate varies between 21.77 and 31.5 kilogram carbon dioxide for each tree. To offset one ton of Carbon dioxide, between 31 and 46 trees are required. One should use a ratio of 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide per tree and an estimate of five hundred trees per hectare to get the values.”. “New Zealand's gross carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, (CO 2-e) per capita.”. Edit 2: Belt tightening because it isn’t cheap to buy one hectare - far far cheaper if I can find another few tens of people that want to do the same thing).