Many capitalists see climate as their next big payday. Finance will be the dominant topic of discussion, negotiation and deal-making at the Conference of the Parties — the United Nations-organized conference on how we fix Earth’s climate, which started Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan, and lasts until Nov. 22.

Investors want to know how to make a buck off of locking away the planet-warming gases that threaten to cook us. The problem is that there is lots of money chasing bad ideas and the standards for solutions to the climate problem are worryingly low.

Carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, sometimes in the form of “carbon sequestration,” is the sexiest option at the moment. The idea is that coal, oil and gas originally came out of the ground, so if we could re-bury all the planet-warming pollution from burning these fuels, we could stabilize Earth’s climate. The problem is that many of the technologies out there “bury” the greenhouse gases for far too short a time to have a material impact on global warming.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere naturally cycle from the air into the ocean, soils, trees and the rest of the biosphere. In turn, forest fires or the tilling of soil are some of the instances in which those gases can be reintroduced back into the atmosphere. This “carbon cycle” matters because carbon dioxide released today by burning oil, for instance, will remain in circulation — moving from the atmosphere to trees to soil and back to the atmosphere to the ocean and so on for a whopping 150,000 years.

Modern people have been on Earth for about 200,000 years. If our distant ancestors had burned up fossil fuels the way we are doing, we would still see the climate effects of their binge on fossil fuel energy.

The greenhouse gases we produce from our car’s tailpipe need to be buried for as long as possible to effectively solve the climate problem, but many proposed approaches are unlikely to be helpful in the long run because burial is not long-term. For instance, there are already trials by the Department of Energy to capture carbon dioxide by growing kelp in the ocean.

When the kelp is sunk in the deep sea, the carbon dioxide sinks with it, potentially being “buried” away for hundreds if not a few thousand years. Still, in the best of cases, this method being chased by big money investors will just create more problems for us in a few centuries when that buried carbon dioxide bubbles out of the ocean again.

Meanwhile, all that sinking kelp will be food for organisms on the seafloor, having the effect of transform a naturally food-poor desert of the deep sea into one teeming with kelp-chomping animals and microbes. We will fundamentally alter deep ocean ecosystems, most likely not for the better, and get only marginal climate benefit. Kelp is not the answer.

One problem is that “sequestration” is often defined as keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for 100 years. That is far too short a time frame for carbon burial than science says will be effective in reversing global warming. If we invest most of our money in century-scale sequestration, we will just be playing “whack-a-mole” with greenhouse gases for the foreseeable future.

Some investors may get a payday, but the climate problem will still be with us. The U.N. should lengthen its “sequestration” target to at least a few tens of thousands of years so society does not have to think about that pollution for a long while.

The value of investments in sequestration should be assessed accordingly. Short-term solutions should not be worth much since they just kick the can down the road. Long-term solutions should be worth a lot.

We are happy to see private finance trying to solve the climate problem. Capitalists can be effective partners with governments, scientists and climate activists, since right now, as bank robber Willie Sutton supposedly said of banks, “That’s where the money is.”

The climate problem will not be solved only by taxes from governments, but will have to involve the private sector. Let us please spend investors’ money wisely!

Norris is a distinguished professor of paleobiology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and lives in Poway. Weiss, Ph.D., is a marine chemistry and geochemistry student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and lives in La Jolla.