Furthermore, direct air capture doesn’t appear to require anything else that isn’t abundant - and the absorption materials and catalysts can be recycled indefinitely.
I’m not sure I’ll live to see it but my belief is that in the latter half of the 21st century we’ll see direct air capture deployed on a truly astonishing scale.
We should, but we don't do enough of that. So let's put efforts where they bring results - even if they'd theoretically bring more results elsewhere, in practice they don't.
In reality we do try to prevent atmosphere pollution from happening, we just don't do enough of it. Some others of us, who're not involved in this process may have better chances with other, less efficient for now but still useful approaches.
A close approach seems to be taken by Terraform Industries - in a sense of scale. Just like Elon Musk repeats that SpaceX doesn't build rockets as much as it buildы a proper rocket industry, Casey Handmer at https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/04/11/climate-tech-c... demonstrates good attention to scale. A BOTE calculations showed that if we have a billion m^3/s of air cleaned from CO2, we'd reduce CO2 in atmosphere twice as fast as we're adding CO2 there. A unit which handles 1 m3/s - given rather simple goal - doesn't look too expensive, and Earth already has a billion personal automobiles, so technically speaking we should be able to have some progress.
We need to pay enough attention to the urgency of the situation, the solutions should really scale.