Charting the course to negative emissions
A new policy roadmap provides Congress and the White House with ways to support the growth of methods to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using everything from existing forests to direct air capture machines.
Driving the news: Recent studies, such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1.5-degree report, point to the need for strategies to drive carbon emissions into negative territory by the latter half of the century.
- Yes, but:Many technologies need to achieve negative emissions — which can only happen after actual emissions are brought to near zero — don’t exist or aren’t ready to scale.
State of play: That’s where the nonprofit Carbon180 comes in. The California and DC-based group aims to promote policy solutions to rapidly push forward a “transformation” in carbon removal.
- What sets this group’s agenda apart from VC firms, oil companies and think tanks working on this issue is their push to ensure removal strategies address environmental justice concerns.
- Veterans of the organization include Ali Zaidi, deputy national climate adviser; Shuchi Talati, chief of staff at the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy; and Kate Gordon, the top climate adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Details: Their new roadmap calls for scaling up R&D, deployment, and demonstration, along with implementing deployment incentives and regulations within the next three years.
- The technologies range from existing land-based solutions, such as protecting and restoring existing forests, to creating new forests as a way to naturally soak up carbon.
- The group also seeks to expand research for marine-based carbon removal.
- With soil carbon solutions, Carbon180 proposes federal policies to reduce barriers for socially disadvantaged farmers.
Carbon180’s roadmap also lays out ideas for federal investments and incentives around nascent direct air capture technologies, which would suck carbon out of the air for sequestration or creating less carbon-intensive fuels.
Be smart: It will take more than just this one group’s roadmap to move this ambitious carbon removal agenda forward, however.
What they’re saying: “It’s really important that we don’t use carbon removal as an excuse to overshoot targets and delay mitigation. It is something that we can deploy, and we want to deploy quickly,” Carbon180’s Erin Burns tells Axios.
“But again… [this is] in addition to really aggressive mitigation,” Burns said.
