I sympathize with what you're saying, because I also agree that voters should make informed choices, and never vote for any politician representing the status quo. Unfortunately, the US and rest of the world have to move through a process. Think of it like addiction: we are still in the denial stage. We haven't hit rock bottom yet, but unfortunately when we do, it will be too late. Most species will be extinct and we'll be starving.

That said, I have to disagree with you on where to place blame. The vast majority of us (6 billion at least) are just running the rat race to provide for our families. Let me be explicitly clear about this: a person's responsibility to change the world is at least proportional to the resources available to them.

I just looked, and each part per million of CO2 represents 7.82 gigaton of CO2. So if we conservatively say that the industrial revolution has taken us from 300 ppm to 400 ppm, then that extra 100 ppm represents 782 gigatons of CO2. There are talks of a global $50 carbon tax credit for each ton of CO2 sequestered. So that represents an externality cost on the environment and our health from existing CO2 levels of $39.1 trillion. That's twice the US GDP.

Now, there are pushes to get back to 350 ppm from groups like 350.org. So that would cost something like $20 trillion, roughly the US GDP, or our national debt. In fact, a real argument can be made that the $21 trillion in misplaced funding from the Pentagon audit, the US national debt and CO2 cost to our environment are all connected. We had that money, but the debt was created so that we couldn't put it towards goals like environmentalism. This was all planned, starting before 1980 when Ronald Reagan took office and symbolically got us to start looking backwards by doing things like removing the solar panels from the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed.

Now that we know all this, I don't think that we can settle for anything less than a tech billionaire opening the floodgates on carbon sequestration. We need real solar-powered devices that take excess energy and store it in things like calcium carbonate and graphite. It looks like it currently costs at least $100 to capture 1 ton of CO2 directly from the atmosphere. At 10 cents equivalent for solar power, that's 1000 kwh per ton. That's the amount of electricity a house uses in a month. I'm having trouble finding exact values for these numbers, but these are the orders of magnitude we should be thinking in terms of.

https://cleantechnica.com/2016/01/19/carbon-capture-expensiv...

https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/11/27/carbon-dioxide-remo...

These numbers are so staggering, that there's literally nothing we can do on a personal level to change them. We need powerful people to think beyond quarterly profits and start doing something tangible with their money.

Which is what I would do if I had won the internet lottery.

Edit: typos and I stumbled onto this, can someone in-the-know please update us on the state of carbon tax credits in the US: https://qz.com/1203803/donald-trump-signed-a-landmark-bill-t...

Edit 2: Yes I'm calling any tech billionaire who does nothing good with their money a poser.