Did you find any schemes where you were satisfied they were genuine? I'd love to know where I could donate money where I could be confident it genuinely had an impact
Downside of CC is it's still too expensive and current methods capture carbon on the order of kilograms/month where gigatons/month is needed. Sure, the tech will improve with time, and there's economies of scale, etc..., but a 10,000,000,000-fold change? Doubt it. Also, there's some fundamental physical limits that you'll hit way before you get close to that throughput. I wouldn't think of them as fraud though, as the people involved (usually) do not lie about what the current state of tech is.
I'd say whatever shows reduction on carbon emissions is a legit thing; far from ideal, but the best thing we have atm.
Some googling suggests that it's $200 per metric ton, is that right?
That would put the cost of capturing the world's entire footprint at $7T per year. That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing. Especially given that once we decide to do it, it will get cheaper quickly.
So, I don't think $200/ton is feasible now. Even if that were the price, 7T/year is like 10% the GDP of the whole world. That means everyone, literally everybody in the planet, people and corps., have to put aside 10% of their income for this to happen. Impossible. I was selling 10k/year commitments to companies making hundreds of millions/year and they were like "nah, we'll think about it".
Sure, if you are spending other people's money, it's cheap. Pretty sure that once you commit to spending $7T per year the amount of fraud will increase dramatically.