A post on Inhabitat:

The zero carbon footprint Grand Cancun mega project is the first marine platform that doesn’t seek to exploit its natural resources. Instead, it seeks to remediate the ocean site in which it is placed. In this case, the platform will filter out hydrocarbons and pollutants to ensure that marine creatures will benefit from a healthier ecosystem and the beachfront’s natural beauty is restored.

There are two types of utopias: one is concrete and the other is airy. Concrete utopias exist today; airy utopias exist in tomorrowland. Concrete utopias exist in space; airy in time. Neoliberalism, the dominant form of economic thinking for the past 30 or so years (it places the market at the center of human sociality), prefers the latter utopia to the former. This is something that Philip Mirowski points out in a late chapter of his new book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. After neoliberalism rejects the growing scientific evidence of climate change, it then attempts to find market solutions to the problem ("carbon permit trading"); and when that does not work, it turns to the science fiction of geoengineering...

So "cap-and-trade" does not work at ameliorating global warming primarily because it was really not intended to do so. But as that intentional consequence becomes clear, it gets displaced by the long-game neoliberal solution. The final neoliberal fallback is geoengineering, which derives from the core neoliberal doctrine that the entrepreneur, unleashed to exploit acts of creative destruction, will eventually innovate market solutions to address dire economic problems. This is the whiz-bang futuristic science fiction side of neoliberalism... It encompasses such phenomena as Earth albedo enhancements through "solar radiation management" [to] CO2 sequestration [to] direct weather modification...

With this deep and important insight in mind, recall what the CEO of Exxon Mobile, Rex Tillerson, said last year:

Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said on Wednesday that efforts to address climate change should focus on engineering methods to adapt to shifting weather patterns and rising sea levels rather than trying to eliminate use of fossil fuels...

[Once one] of the staunchest critics of climate change research, [the corporation] has acknowledged under Tillerson's leadership that human-made emissions have contributed to altering the planet's climate. The company now supports taxing carbon emissions.

What all of this comes down to is this: The market wants things to stay as they are. Meaning, it does not want to address the problem in a concrete way, which would mean changing our behavior (the real deal). Geoengineering not only offers a market solution (rather than a democratic one) but it means the market remains fixed at the center of out lives and continues to conduct our conduct.