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The culture wars are threatening one of the few bipartisan areas of climate policy.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
The Science Based Targets initiative released long-awaited guidance that doesn’t exactly clarify matters.
Widespread federal layoffs bring even more uncertainty to the DAC hubs program.
On congestion pricing, carbon capture progress, and Tim Kaine.
Chestnut Carbon announces a major new funding round on the heels of its deal with Microsoft.
Three tactics from Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, on how the industry can use this time wisely.
Erin Burns has been here before. The executive director of Carbon180, a carbon removal research and policy nonprofit, joined the organization as its first policy director in 2018, partway through Donald Trump’s first term as president. It was under that administration that she helped win the first ever dedicated federal research and development funding for carbon removal, a modest $60 million in 2019.
It’s a very different world today than it was then, so she wasn’t exactly here. There’s now billions of dollars in federal funding appropriated to pull carbon from the atmosphere — not just for research and development, but also for building commercial-scale projects and purchasing carbon removal services. At the same time, this new Trump administration is moving more quickly and aggressively than the last one to undo anything resembling climate policy, and future attempts to re-allocate some of that money are not out of the question.
I recently spoke to Burns about how she’s looking to make progress on carbon removal under these circumstances. Here are my big takeaways from the conversation.
It’s not yet clear how the Trump administration or new Congress is going to act on existing carbon removal programs. Although the industry has a history of receiving bipartisan support and federally-funded carbon removal projects are happening in Republican states and districts, that doesn’t mean these programs are safe. “The rollback of certain policies are not ultimately going to be about how people feel about direct air capture or carbon removal,” Burns told me. “It’s going to be a broader ideology around the role of a place like the Department of Energy, and what kinds of supports the federal government should provide.”
With that in mind, Burns’ motto is “the best defense is a good offense.” That means working with the congresspeople who supported the direct air capture hubs to highlight why the government should continue investing in them. It also involves working with labor unions with members in heavy industry who see the jobs potential. It’s time to double down on a more expansive argument for the benefits of these projects, she said. “There are additional benefits to every carbon removal pathway. We should always be talking about them. Climate’s not going to be the argument that gets you those really durable political coalitions.”
Playing offense also means planning for the next opening. The reason the Biden administration made so much progress on carbon removal, Burns said, is that advocates like her spent two years under the Trump administration meeting weekly, developing policy and “socializing” it, so that it was “ready to go.” As policy enactment in Washington slows down, advocates will have more capacity to sit down and develop the next wave of ideas. To Burns, that means thinking about a more tailored, ground-up approach.
“To be honest, we don’t really have carbon removal policy in the United States,” Burns told me. “We have direct air capture policy, and even that is, like, point-source carbon capture policy that’s been tweaked to fit direct air capture.” An example is the 45Q tax credit, which was originally created to support projects that capture carbon from the smokestacks of coal plants, but was expanded to support direct air capture projects as well.
But carbon removal is not just direct air capture — it’s also planting trees and grinding rocks, activities that likely require different policies and supports than big air-sucking machines to scale up. Leveraging all that to its fullest extent will require a more expansive policy regime.
“Let’s start from scratch,” Burns said. “Start to grapple with the fundamental nature of carbon removal as a unique thing that isn’t going to be deployed only with the policies that we’ve used to deploy technologies like solar. Because carbon removal is not going to create electricity, for example. It’s not just about making it cheap enough that there’s going to be this market force. Making it cheaper is great, but you also have to think about the other barriers.”
Before coming to Carbon180, Burns worked at the center-left think tank Third Way on carbon capture and nuclear energy policy. While she was there, Trump proposed dramatically slashing the Department of Energy’s budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and eliminating the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which supports the early development of technologies that are too risky for private investment.
“You can get some unusual bedfellows together when you have an administration that’s trying to cut, say, all of the Department of Energy,” Burns said. Instead of renewable developers and nuclear power companies and carbon removal startups all fighting for a piece of the pie, there’s incentive to come together and “make sure the pie still exists.”
It’s not just about preserving funding. The carbon removal industry also needs to be making inroads with adjacent industries because they have common interests. Direct air capture facilities need renewable energy to operate. and right now the future of renewable energy is under major threat. Similarly, direct air capture projects need the Environmental Protection Agency to be well-staffed enough to continue permitting carbon sequestration wells — a process that was slow to start but starting to pick up at the end of Biden’s term. “I think there’s value in us thinking about what it means to not just defend carbon removal, but defend all of this climate infrastructure that is going to be necessary for us to be successful.”
In her past work on carbon capture, Burns grew familiar with a divide between players who were genuinely trying to fight climate change and those for whom carbon capture was just a line in their advertising budget. In her view, the carbon removal industry has been different, with most companies genuinely trying to do the right thing for the climate. It’s an open question as to whether that might change in this new political environment, she said.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy was staffed with some of the leading carbon removal experts in the country. Now there may be less pressure on companies to have high standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying carbon removal outcomes — meaning more of an opening to fudge the truth of how much benefit their projects are providing.
The Trump administration is also scaling back the size of agencies’ staff and removing requirements for companies that receive financial assistance to do things like ensure that the communities hosting their projects also benefit from them. Burns said the onus is on organizations like Carbon180 and on corporate carbon removal buyers to maintain high standards not just for measurement, but also for community engagement. “If you care about deploying CDR, you need to care about local support for those projects,” she said.
For one, community opposition can shut down a project. But also, bringing benefits to host communities helps build political support for carbon removal that can lead to more federal aid down the line. “Those are keys for long-term success.”
Absolute Climate wants to grade all carbon credits the exact same way.
In the wake of a wave of scandals in the carbon credit market, a boatload of brokers arrived to mediate between buyers and sellers and improve the integrity of carbon claims. In came the consulting firms staffed by scientists to advise companies on which credits to buy, ratings agencies to assess individual carbon projects, and carbon credit registries with new business models that promised to be more scrupulous than those that came before.
But to Peter Minor, none of these players is getting at the root issue. So Minor, an alum of the carbon removal advocacy group Carbon180, is launching his own company, Absolute Climate, to solve what he sees as the two biggest problems in the carbon credit market: inconsistent accounting and conflicts of interest.
“If we don’t fix these things, the carbon removal industry may never get to the trust and adoption that it’s going to need to get to enough scale to actually reduce harms,” Minor told me.
Absolute Climate’s solution is a new standard, or set of rules, for accounting for the climate benefits of carbon removal projects that would ensure carbon credits from different projects are comparable on an apples to apples basis. That is, as long as it’s widely accepted by a market that’s fraught with divisions.
To date, the registries — the businesses that certify and sell carbon credits — have been the ones to create and oversee accounting standards. But the registries have an incentive to set permissive requirements, Minor said, because the more credits they certify, the more they can sell. This arrangement has resulted in standards that all use slightly different criteria to account for how much carbon has been removed. These differences show up not just across registries, but also within registries across different types of projects.
Here’s an illustrative example: Climeworks is a company that builds industrial-scale plants to suck carbon out of the air, compress it, and inject it underground. Under the carbon removal registry Puro’s standard, Climeworks must take into account the emissions related to clearing the land, building the plant, powering it, transporting the captured carbon, and injecting it before coming up with the net total tons of carbon the plant has removed and the number of credits the company can sell.
Compare that to Red Trail Energy, which owned a corn ethanol refinery and recently began capturing carbon emitted from the facility’s fermentation tank and injecting it underground. Corn absorbs carbon from the atmosphere as it grows, and Red Trail puts away some of that carbon permanently. But to calculate how many carbon removal credits Red Trail can sell based on this project, Puro does not require the company to account for the emissions associated with growing the corn, transporting it to the plant, or heating it up using a natural gas boiler. Nor does it require measurement of the emissions released when the ethanol is burned in a vehicle. If it did, all those emissions would exceed the amount of carbon Red Trail is storing.
On the Puro registry, Climeworks’ credits and Red Trail’s credits are identical, both advertised as carbon removal. But to Minor, the credits are fundamentally different — one is a truly net-negative process, the other reduces emissions to the atmosphere from an existing source. Once the world has cut carbon nearly to zero, only the first project could provide a counterweight to any residual emissions and help halt or even reverse warming. Minor worries that if both are called carbon removal, the difference won’t be clear until it’s too late.
“We might get to the point where we’ve scaled up the infrastructure and the political economies around certain projects because they were cheaper or more efficient in our minds, but actually it’s just that they weren’t net-negative,” he said. “So we may put ourselves in a position where we can’t actually meet our climate goals.”
Minor is not alone in this concern. Several recent peer-reviewed papers have identified this as a pervasive issue and proposed ideas for how to solve it. “Big picture, we want net flux of carbon out of the atmosphere into storage,” Anu Khan, founder of the non-profit Carbon Removal Standards Initiative, told me. “We want to set rules that motivate this and allow us to add it up over time.”
Absolute Climate’s solution is based on a framework developed by scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Minor described it as a single standard that verifiers can apply in exactly the same way to every method of carbon removal and determine whether a given project is net-negative or not. Each type of carbon removal, like enhanced rock weathering or direct air capture, will still require individualized rules for how it should conduct physical measurements, he said. But the project scope — the question of what to measure — will be consistent.
In practice this doesn’t seem like a major paradigm shift. It requires project developers to identify all the activities associated with their project that either release or store carbon, measure each one, and add them together to get the net result. The main difference is that they can’t selectively ignore certain emissions in the calculation if, for example, those emissions are related to a co-product like ethanol.
To meet Absolute’s standard, a project must also be able to store carbon for 1,000 years, similar to the amount of time carbon emissions stay in the atmosphere. That’s in contrast to most standards, which have different requirements depending on the project type. For example, reforestation and soil carbon storage projects typically only have to store carbon for 100 years, while any project injecting carbon underground has to promise 1,000 years.
Any carbon credit registry can adopt the standard, and the company will earn a fee for each project certified under it, rather than for the number of credits certified. One registry, called Evident, which sells renewable energy credits, has already agreed to use it.
But it’s hard to imagine other registries that have invested significant time into developing standards — and certified credits using them — throwing those out anytime soon. When I wrote about the questions raised by the Red Trail Energy project earlier this year, Puro defended its rules. Marianne Tikkanen, Puro’s co-founder and head of standards, said the point of carbon credits is to pay for an intervention that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. In this case, that meant it was appropriate to isolate the carbon capture and storage part of the project when it came to certifying credits, she said.
Adding yet another layer between buyers and sellers could also increase costs. “There are market pressures that drive towards vertical integration of registries that do everything,” Khan told me. “Cost savings are a really big deal. Companies want to buy credits at the lowest cost that is good enough for the type of claim that they want to make.”
Absolute will face competition, both in the literal market and in the marketplace of ideas, from Isometric, a registry my colleague Katie Brigham wrote about earlier this year. Isometric has tried to address the conflict of interest problem by charging fees to buyers — not sellers — for verifying carbon credits.
In setting such a high bar, Absolute also risks having a chilling effect on the carbon removal industry by blocking promising projects that are working through yet-unproven science or have other early-stage growing pains from a key source of funding. As a solution, Absolute plans to designate some projects as part of an “innovative class.” One example Minor gave me is a new direct air capture company that can’t procure enough renewable energy to power its pilot plant and has to run using dirty power. “We can allow them to take those shortcuts where it makes sense, assuming their buyers or the governments that they’re delivering to are okay with that, but we’re going to be transparent about it,” he said.
In short, there will be two classes of credits under the Absolute standard — those that really, definitely, represent carbon removed from the atmosphere, and those that may or may not but support projects that maybe one day could.
This is all a lot to make sense of, and it’s possible Absolute could introduce more confusion into the market with all these new terms and definitions.
“This is most valuable, I think, for those people who care about whether or not what they are investing in can play that future role of being actual carbon removal,” Corinne Scown, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory whose work influenced the Absolute standard, told me. But for those who just want to fund projects that help fight climate change, the distinction matters less, she said. “Mitigation is still really valuable. We do want people to have a way to pay for that.”
While there are some companies trying to do the former, most are aiming mainly to reduce the amount of emissions on their annual sustainability reports. Today, these reports are voluntary and companies can use whatever math suits them. But soon they will be required by governments such as the European Union and the state of California, which will have rules about how companies should calculate their carbon footprints. Depending on how those rules are implemented, the distinction between an Absolute-certified carbon credit and a Puro-certified carbon credit could matter a great deal.
