Say you went to a state of the art carbon sequestering facility, and you see the machine pumping away, what can you verify? Do you trust bureaucrats to correctly measure an invisible 'good', that will be hidden/"stored" inaccessibly underground?
It's a world away from tangible goods, eg cars in a production line, or water in pipes. The whole business remains entirely invisible and has scam written all over it.
You absolutely can measure that, in the same way that you measure that manufacturers are producing cars that don't emit nitrogen oxides above regulated limits or that manufacturers aren't dumping cadmium into nearby rivers or that worksites aren't making employees work on telephone poles without safety gear: You have an organization that reads all the relevant research, develops tests, runs those tests, and is empowered to Apply Consequences To violators. You don't trust some anonymous "bureaucrats", you trust a dedicated organization of subject matter experts and specialist inspectors that know how things are supposed to work and understand all the dodgy tricks that people are going to pull. This is how we went from The Jungle and Silent Spring and the hole in the ozone layer to where we are today. This approach works.
The EPA. OSHA and per-state equivalents. The part of the FDA that inspects production lines. The FSIS. The NTSB. The USCSB. Essentially every individual city, municipal area, and state has its own health inspection service that shuts down unclean restaurants to keep them from killing people. Seriously, I listed Upton Sinclair's The Jungle for a reason, this is not a theoretical concern, this actually happens to this day and we know what it looks like when we don't have people dealing with it. This is not just something we can do, it's something we actually do, continuously and successfully, at every scale of government. This problem has known solutions that are reliable enough that every single city in the country has successfully implemented them.
The approach works but as The Jungle teaches us they (as in capitalists) will fight you every inch of the way and constantly try to roll back any progress.
This is not a smooth quick process - it takes generations and many many dead and suffering.
My prediction is before climate change effects get much worse in the west not many serious changes will be made.
No - its that they are in it together, working to (parasitically) extract even more wealth from the people creating the wealth.
When you use law to change the conditions, eg by creating a new product (carbon) that is invisible but licensed and that everyone is going to pay (on their bills) - ie a new wheeze or tax - you won't get acceptance without some sort of show.
It's a world away from tangible goods, eg cars in a production line, or water in pipes. The whole business remains entirely invisible and has scam written all over it.