You keep acting like trees are harming humans. Personally I haven’t been harmed by a tree before and I’m happy everytime I see one. They’re much nicer to look at, less noisy, require less roads and provide more shade than cars. Also they don’t burn fossils.
Following your logic, since trees are carbon neutral and presumably only create problems for future generations, we’d have to go and remove all trees that exist on Earth. Sounds like something the woodcutting lobby would say.
It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.
Instead of wasting energy and effort trying to remove existing CO2 from the air, people should instead spend effort on not releasing more carbon dioxide into the air. It’s similar to things like plastic waste where it’s better not to create any waste than to recycle plastic, or the same as private transport where it’s better to not have or drive a private car or private jet than to drive or fly energy efficient.
There’s about 0.05% CO2 in the air. So pulling CO2 from the air is as inefficient as it gets. It’s somewhere between moving to Antarctica to bathe in the sun and using the full moon for solar panels.
The theoretical best place to sun bathe is, unsurprisingly, on the sun! Similarly it’s best to scrub CO2 at the source, meaning the exhausts! Filter it at motors, kilns, chimneys, etc.
Are you aware that trees can have offspring and even multiply?
They’re CO2 storages that can provide fruits, shadow, oxygen and other nice things. That’s pretty neat.
I think that’d be too little “bang for your buck” to be worth it. Investments might make matters even worse. After all, at some point building more and more energy generators for less and less efficient things will have severe drawbacks. Those energy generators aren’t built for free, nor are the machines necessary to build them, let alone the inefficient machines used to scrub co2 from the air.
I believe an active push towards carbon dioxide removal can be a double edged sword and even dangerous, especially if it relies on electricity (as opposed to actions which provide other benefits and help nature recover, like restoring forests, marshes/wetlands, etc.). As long as people want to do it with electricity, the demand for fossile fuels for electricity is bound to increase one way or another. Even if one country wants to do it 100% clean and could produce enough energy for direct air capture and all of its inhabitants are trustworthy, they’re still going to be in competition with other countries - and if country A happens to own all the materials to build things like batteries or wind turbines, then country B will struggle and instead rely on gas or coal plants.
Some lobbyists might tell you otherwise, but there’s definitely many many more important than things to invest time/effort/money into. Social care, social injustice, public transportation, energy storage/stability, natural disasters, peace, climate refugees, etc.