I'm personally pretty optimistic about direct air capture. Right now, we just need to stop the bleeding and get to global net ~zero emissions with the tools we

I'm personally pretty optimistic about direct air capture. Right now, we just need to stop the bleeding and get to global net ~zero emissions with the tools we have (renewables, nuclear, carbon capture, etc.). It seems like we're on track to accomplish that at least some time this century. By the time we've gotten there, direct air capture should be a relatively mature technology, and energy should be much more abundant between continued advancement on renewables and early iterations of commercial fusion. With any luck, we'll even have highly automated and scalable AI-driven manufacturing and infrastructure deployment capabilities to make a mass rollout of DAC relatively cheap. As long as we survive long enough with no major societal upheaval, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to restore the planet to preindustrial CO2 levels by some time next century, or (very optimistically) around the turn of this century. It's not going to solve itself overnight, and climate change will get worse before it gets better, but I think we're basically doing the right things. Maybe in the meantime someone will figure out how to process landfills into fuel and mass produce microorganisms that feed on microplastics.