Without having actually done the research the White House is now funding, we can't just draw these conclusions and dismiss the ideas as impractical. Funding the research is good. Maybe there is a relatively cheap (can be funded by one nation) and reversible way to do this, don't we have to at least try to find it?

There is no rational reason to be against gathering more information.

> It's far cheaper just to replace, say, 1-3% of fossil fuel production per year with equivalent wind/solar/storage.

But this isn't going to happen, and even if it were, it's too little too late to stop climate change, a lot of which is already locked in due to past emissions.