People saying that we've lost the battle against climate change really seem deeply, perhaps intentionally, ignorant of the range of policy options we have. They are correct that simply gradually cutting CO2 emissions isn't sufficient, but...
... the tiny amount of research we've done on direct carbon air removal suggests we can do it for less than $200/ton. Removing 10 GT/year will cost us 2.3% of *current* GDP, which is far less than estimates of the cost of climate change itself.
Further, this is probably the "cleanest", safest, and by far most expensive way to fix things. The cheapest types of geoengineering may cost less than $10B/year, which is virtually nothing. It's a rounding error in a large nation's budget and easily affordable for a poor one.
We're seeing now that road vehicles, a major sources of CO2 emissions, are on a glide path to full electrification. Virtually everything--cars, trucks, and buses--will soon be as cheap or cheaper to be fully electrified in coming decades. We can easily speed this up.
It's also very plausible we can have a zero-carbon electricity grid in the near future if we try. France already figured out this in the 80s with nuclear power. If you cringe about nuclear, it may also be possible with renewables + storage + a worldwide HVDC grid, all plausibly.
People also scoff about this, but there is a serious possibility--especially if we accelerate R&D--that safe and unlimited nuclear fusion could be practically available in coming decades!
There are a huge variety of policy and technology options, many with big tradeoffs but still vastly preferable to the status quo. Any one example has risks, drawbacks, and may not work out. But it is vanishingly unlikely that none of them will.
