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Plus how it’s different from carbon capture — and, while we’re at it, carbon offsets.
At the heart of the climate crisis lies a harsh physical reality: Once carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, it can stay there for hundreds or even thousands of years. Although some carbon does cycle in and out of the air via plants, soils, and the ocean, we are emitting far more than these systems can handle, meaning that most of it is just piling up. Burning fossil fuels is like continuously stuffing feathers into a duvet blanketing the Earth.
But there may be ways to begin plucking them out. That’s the promise of carbon removal, a category of technologies and interventions that either pull carbon dioxide from the air and store it securely or enhance the systems that naturally absorb carbon today.
Carbon removal is not, inherently, a license to continue emitting — it is far cheaper and easier to reduce the flow of emissions into the atmosphere than it is to remove them after the fact. Climate action has been so slow, however, that removing carbon has become a pressing consideration.
There are many technical, political, and economic challenges to deploying carbon removal at a meaningful scale. This guide will introduce you to some of those challenges, along with the basics of what carbon removal is, the rationale for trying to do it, and the risks and trade-offs we’ll encounter along the way. Let’s dive in.
Variously called carbon removal, carbon dioxide removal, CDR, and negative emissions technologies, all of these terms refer to efforts to suck carbon from the atmosphere and store it in places where it will not warm the planet, such as oceans, soils, plants, and underground. The science behind carbon removal spans atmospheric studies, oceanography, biology, geology, chemistry, and engineering. The carbon removal “industry” overlaps with oil and gas drilling, farming, forestry, mining, and construction — sometimes several of these sectors at once.
Carbon removal encompasses an astonishingly wide range of activities, but the two best known examples are probably the simple practice of planting a tree and the complex engineering project of building a “direct air capture system.” The latter are typically big machines that use industrial-sized fans to blow air through a material that filters carbon dioxide, and then apply heat to extract the carbon from the filter.
But there are many other methods that fall somewhere in between. “Enhanced rock weathering” involves taking minerals that are known to slowly pull carbon from the air as they break down over millennia and trying to speed up those reactions by grinding them into a fine dust and spreading it on agricultural fields. In “ocean alkalinity enhancement,” minerals are deposited directly into the ocean, catalyzing chemical reactions that may enable surface waters to soak up more carbon from the atmosphere. Companies are also experimenting with ways to take carbon-rich organic waste, like sewage, corn stalks, and forest debris, and bury it permanently underground or transform it into more stable materials like biochar.
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report / Working Group III
If you read the words “carbon capture” literally, then yes, carbon removal involves capturing carbon. It’s common to see news articles use the terms interchangeably. But “carbon capture” is also the name for a technology that addresses a very different problem, with different challenges and implications. For that reason, it’s useful to distinguish carbon removal as its own category.
By definition, carbon removal deals with carbon that was previously emitted into the atmosphere — the feathers piling up in the duvet. Carbon capture, by contrast, has historically referred to systems that collect carbon from the flue of an industrial site, like a power plant, before it can enter the atmosphere.
Some carbon removal methods, such as the aforementioned direct air capture machines, share equipment with carbon capture. Both might use materials called sorbents to separate carbon from flue gas or from the air, and both rely on pipelines and drilling to transport the carbon to underground storage wells. But carbon capture cleans up and extends the relevance of present-day industrial processes and fuels. Carbon removal can be deployed concurrent with or independent of today’s energy systems and addresses the legacy carbon still hanging around.
There are different opinions on this. Some consider “geoengineering” to mean any large-scale intervention to counteract climate change. Others reserve the term for interventions that deal only with the effects of climate change, rather than the root cause. For example, solar radiation management, an idea to release tiny particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight back into space, would cool the Earth but not change the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. If we started to do it at scale and then stopped, global warming would rear right back, unless and until the carbon blanketing the atmosphere was removed.
Any global cooling achieved by carbon removal, by contrast, would likely be more durable. To be clear, scientists don’t propose trying to use carbon removal to bring global average temperatures back down to levels seen during the pre-industrial period. It would already take an almost unimaginably large-scale effort to cool the planet just a half a degree or so with carbon removal — more on that in a bit.
While scientists have been talking about carbon removal for decades, a sense of urgency to develop practicable solutions emerged in the years following the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. The signatories to that United Nations agreement, which included almost every nation in the world, committed to limit warming to “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels” and strive for no more than 1.5 degrees of warming.
When scientists with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reviewed more than a thousand modeled scenarios mapping out how the world could achieve these goals, they found that it would be extraordinarily difficult without some degree of carbon removal. We had emitted so much by that point and made so little progress to change our energy systems that success required either cutting emissions at an unfathomably fast clip, cutting emissions more gradually and rapidly scaling up carbon removal to counteract the residuals, or “overshooting” the temperature targets altogether and using carbon removal to back into them.
If limiting warming to 1.5 degrees was a stretch back then, today it’s become even more implausible. “Recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5°C goal will not be met,” reads a January 2025 report from the independent climate science research group Berkeley Earth. The authors expect the threshold to be crossed in the next five to 10 years. Another independent research group, Climate Action Tracker, estimates that current policies put the world on track to warm 2.7 degrees by the end of the century.
To many, carbon removal may seem Sisyphean. As long as we’re still flooding the atmosphere with carbon, trying to take it out bit by bit sounds futile.
But our relatively slow progress cleaning up our energy systems only strengthens the case to develop carbon removal. Just think of all the carbon that’s continuing to accumulate! If we reach a point in the future where energy is cleaner and emissions are significantly lower, carbon removal offers a chance to siphon out some of it and start to reverse the dangerous effects of climate change. If we don’t start building that capacity today, future generations will not have that option.
Scientists also make the case that carbon removal will be essential to halting climate change, never mind reversing it. That’s because there are some human activities that are so difficult or expensive to decarbonize — think commercial aviation, shipping, agriculture — that it may be easier, more economical, or even more environmentally friendly to remove the greenhouse gases they emit after the fact. Stopping the planet from warming does not necessarily require eliminating all emissions. The more likely path is to achieve “net zero,” a point where any remaining emissions are counterbalanced by an equal amount of carbon removal, including from human activities as well as natural carbon sinks.
It would certainly be easier, less expensive, and less resource-intensive to cut emissions today than it will be to remove them in the future. Some scientists have even argued we may be better off assuming carbon removal will not work at scale, as that might motivate more rapid emissions reductions. But the IPCC concluded pretty definitively in 2022 that carbon removal will be required if we want to stabilize global temperatures below 2 degrees this century.
The Paris Agreement temperature targets are not thresholds after which the world falls apart. But every tenth of a degree of warming will strain the Earth’s systems and test human survival more than the last. Abandoning carbon removal means accepting whatever dangerous and devastating effects we fail to avoid.
The latest edition of the “State of CDR” report, put together by a group of leading carbon removal researchers, found that all of the Paris Agreement-consistent scenarios modeled in the scientific literature require removing between 4 billion and 6 billion metric tons of carbon per year by 2035, and between 6 billion and 10 billion metric tons by 2050. For context, they estimate that the world currently removes about 2 billion metric tons of carbon per year over and above what the Earth would naturally absorb without human interference, 99% of which comes from planting trees and managing forests.
These estimates, however, are steeped in uncertainty, as the models make assumptions about the cost and speed of decarbonization and society’s willingness to make behavioral changes such as eating less meat and flying less. We could work toward other futures with less reliance on carbon removal. We could also passively drift toward one that calls for far more.
In short, the amount of carbon removal that may be desirable in the future depends largely on how quickly we reduce emissions and how successful we are in solving the hardest-to-decarbonize parts of the economy. It also depends on what kinds of trade-offs society is willing to make. Large-scale carbon removal would likely be resource-intensive, requiring a lot of land, energy, or both, and could impinge on other sustainability goals.
Afforestation and reforestation are responsible for most carbon removal that happens today, and planting more trees is essential to tackling climate change. But it would be a mistake to bank our carbon removal strategy on that approach alone. For one, depending on how much carbon removal is needed, there may not be enough land that can or should be forested without encroaching on food production or other uses. Large-scale tree planting efforts also often produce monoculture plantations, which are an inexpensive way to maximize carbon sequestration but can harm biodiversity.
The other argument for developing alternative solutions has to do with time. As I explained earlier, carbon dioxide emissions can stay in the atmosphere for millennia. Most tree species do not live longer than 1,000 years, and some are known to survive only for a few decades. The carbon stored in trees is vulnerable to fires, pests, disease, drought, and the simple fact of mortality. Climate change is already increasing these risks.
If we use carbon removal to neutralize residual fossil fuel emissions — which, again, could help us halt warming faster than we otherwise would be able to — the carbon will need to stay out of the atmosphere for as long as the emissions stay in. When we rely on trees to offset CO2 emissions, the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote in a 2022 New York Times op-ed, we “risk merely hitting the climate ‘snooze’ button, kicking the can to future generations who will have to deal with those emissions.”
Every form of carbon removal has trade-offs. Direct air capture uses lots of energy; enhanced rock weathering relies on dirty mining processes and its effectiveness is difficult to measure. It’s still too early to know the extent to which these can be minimized, or to say what the ideal mix of solutions looks like.
There are hundreds of companies and research labs around the world working on various methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the number of real-world projects is growing every year. But the field’s progress is limited by funding. There’s no natural market for carbon removal — it’s essentially a public service. Most of the money going into the field has come from tech companies like Microsoft and Stripe, which have voluntarily paid for carbon removals that haven’t happened yet to help startups access capital to deploy demonstration projects.
Experts across the industry say that in order for carbon removal to scale, governments will need to play a much bigger role. For one, they’ll likely need to pony up for research and development. The U.S. government has been spending about $1 billion per year to support carbon removal research, but according to one estimate, we’ll need to scale that to $100 billion per year by 2050 in order to make the technology set a viable solution. Many argue that compliance markets, in which governments require companies to lower their emissions and permit the purchase of carbon removal to meet targets, will be key to creating sustained demand. (These are not to be confused with carbon offsets, which have also been part of these markets, but have been more focused on projects that avoid emissions.) That’s already starting to happen abroad — this summer, the U.K. decided to incorporate removals into its emissions cap and trade program in 2029, and the E.U. proposed doing the same.
The few programs we do have in the U.S., on the other hand, are currently at risk. Congress appropriated $3.5 billion to the Department of Energy in 2021 to develop several direct air capture “hubs,” but Secretary of Energy Chris Wright may try to cancel the program. The agency also had a pilot program in which it planned to pre-pay for carbon removal, similar to what the tech companies have done, but it’s unclear whether that will move forward. But there’s more action in other countries.
Another central preoccupation in the field today is the development of robust standards that ensure we can accurately measure and report how much carbon is removed by each method. While this is relatively straightforward for a direct air capture system, which is a closed system, it’s much harder for enhanced rock weathering, for example, where there are a lot of outside variables that could affect the fate of the carbon.
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Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 28 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.