Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but I legitimately don't know: does the thermodynamic argument hold up? (Broadly, I agree that humanity needs a healthier relationship with industrialism before fixing this is possible).

A few ways I can imagine it doesn't:

- We can reduce warming by other means, like changing the Earth's albedo.

- A lot more energy falls to Earth every day from the sun than we use via petroleum; a good amount of solar/wind would let us climb back up the hill via sequestration.

- We don't need to sequester CO2/methane into high-energy-density hydrocarbons; could an efficient sequestration process yield eventually net positive energy per unit greenhouse gas from the burn -> sequester process?

Yeah, this is all true! All of these things are also insanely hard, like, orders of magnitude harder than what we usually mean by “insanely hard,” and might be near-impossible in a similar way that unburning all the carbon is near-impossible, only… somewhat less so. I only talk about unburning all the carbon to emphasize the sheer scale of the problem. There are things you can “fix” or “clean up” or “undo” like, surprisingly, the ozone hole. This is not something we can undo. We can at best halt it, and even slowing it would be (will be) historically traumatic.

Not a dumb question at all.