The hope (and IMHO only reason) for geo-engineering approaches is that they can enable achieving a large effect with a much smaller political sacrifice than cutting people's consumption or preventing some countries from increasing their consumption to "first-world" levels, and at a smaller cost than that.
If someone finds a plausible way to reduce a major part of global greenhouse gases that costs merely, say, 10 or 100 billion, then that's something that a few major countries can do (and fund) unilaterally and doesn't need global consensus, unlike major emissions reductions which have the tragedy of commons problem where if you do that and other major emitters don't, then you've crippled your economy but haven't prevented any of the bad consequences.