We need to reduce - that is the solution.
If only there was some turnkey design we could build that produces utterly massive amounts of energy with a few grams of fuel that can also be continually recycled based on physical principles understood for over a century.
Fortunately for environmentalists, no such solution exists. Could you imagine how much of a socioeconomic disaster it would be if we printed a trillion dollars to build hundreds of gigawatts of excess generating capacity to just run carbon capture directly (and desalinization once we're done with that)?
Besides, we would never print a trillion dollars to save 0.01 quality-adjusted-life-years across the world population. The bill for that is just too high.
Then I looked up a few numbers. At 20Bil a pop, 5Tril only gets you 250 reactors. US already has ~100 reactors, but that’s only 8% of our energy usage. So 2.5x that gets us fully off coal and 1/4 of our natural gas, and it doesn’t touch our oil usage at all. So we’d still be 50% fossilized. Sad.
This is Napkin math of course. But this shows how dang large a project we have left to do…
[0] Some numbers from here https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and...
That all said - the amount of power we'd need for carbon sequestration with our current technological prowess dwarfs what we're producing at the moment and would require a massive investment in human and material capital that I don't believe the US (at least) is willing to deal with. The only nation that I'd really hold my breath here for is France which, while it has some significant issues itself, it has a strong advantage in having a workforce that is actually trained to operate and care for nuclear plants.
If we could effectively communicate the science we could support/fund more scientific solutions. However, money rots science too.