The Profit-Driven Carbon Removal Industry Pits Planet Saving Measures Against Corporate Clean-Ups

Thursday - December 14 2023, 21:13 UTC - 11 months ago

Two former staffers of the US agency responsible for advancing the technology argue that the profit-driven carbon removal industry’s focus on cleaning up corporate emissions will come at the expense of helping to pull the planet back from dangerous levels of warming. Existing efforts have largely been funded by companies voluntarily paying for them in the face of investor pressure. Researchers propose two alternative models that could help ensure the necessary annual investments for CDR are not dedicated to corporate clean-ups while these companies are polluting the planet in other ways.

The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it’s already headed in the wrong direction. Two former staffers of the US agency responsible for advancing the technology argue that the profit-driven industry’s focus on cleaning up corporate emissions will come at the expense of helping to pull the planet back from dangerous levels of warming.

Numerous studies have found that the world may have to remove tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year by around midcentury to keep global warming in check. These findings have spawned significant investments into startups developing carbon-sucking direct-air-capture factories and companies striving to harness the greenhouse-gas-trapping potential of plants, minerals, and the oceans.

But a fundamental challenge is that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) isn’t a product that any person or company "needs," in the traditional market sense. Rather, carrying it out provides a collective societal good, in the way that waste management does, only with larger global stakes. To date, it’s largely been funded by companies that are voluntarily paying for it as a form of corporate climate action in the face of rising investor, customer, employee, or regulatory pressures. That includes purchases of future removal through the $1 billion Frontier effort, started by Stripe and other companies.

There’s also some growing government support in countries including the US, which is funding carbon removal projects, offering a comparatively small amount of money to companies that provide the service and subsidizing those that store away carbon dioxide.But in a lengthy and pointed essay published in the journal Carbon Management on December 12, researchers Emily Grubert and Shuchi Talati argue there are rising dangers for the field. Both previously worked for the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which drove several of the recent US efforts to develop the industry.

They write that the emergence of a for-profit, growth-focused sector selling a carbon removal product, instead of a publicly funded and coordinated effort more akin to waste management, "presents grave risks for the ability of CDR to enable net zero and net negative targets in general," including keeping global warming at 1.5 ºC over preindustrial levels or pulling the planet back to that level.

"If we missallocate our limited CDR resources and end up not having access to the capacity that can help meet the needs we really have, climatically, that’s a problem," says Grubert, now an associate professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame. "It means we’re never going to get there." .

One of their main concerns is that corporations have come to see carbon removal as a relatively simple and reliable way of canceling out ongoing climate pollution that they have other ways of cleaning up, which the authors refer to as "luxury" removal. That could significantly increase the total carbon removal the world would need to pull off, and effectively dedicate a large share of a limited resource to things that don’t necessarily help with the bigger goal.

The researchers propose two alternative models that they claim offer different approaches to the task. One is a carbon bank, in which a group of funders would have the power to direct carbon removal investments consistently toward the places and technologies that make the most climatic sense. The other is an as-yet-undefined entity or market that could organize and oversee all actions that enable and support rapidly scaling CDR. The two approaches, or some fusion of the two, could help ensure that the $100 billion to $400 billion annual investments they estimate would be necessary for CDR to fulfill its promise are not dedicated to corporate clean-ups when those same companies are polluting the planet in other ways.

The researchers’ main message is that promoting CDR should come with some amount of collective planning and governance, so that it can be done in the right amounts, in the right places, and with the right technologies to ensure it’s actually meeting climate goals. Otherwise, the entire endeavor could be a bust, they argue.