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The carbon removal company has a pitch to solve the industry’s biggest “moral hazard.”
The carbon removal industry has exploded over the past few years, with billions of dollars in government funding and venture capital flowing to startups, nonprofits, and university research centers working on different ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. But all the attention has also stirred up a long running controversy about whether this solution is a dangerous distraction.
Critics worry that governments and corporations will not work as hard to cut greenhouse gas emissions if they believe they’ll eventually be able to reverse them. Some have warned this is already happening. On Thursday, Climeworks, one of the leading companies developing machines that suck carbon dioxide from the air, published a manifesto of sorts to fend off the risk that its technology is used to delay climate action.
The Swiss company’s statement calls for “a clear distinction between emissions reductions and carbon removals” in corporate and national climate plans and in the carbon market. It can be read as a pitch to improve the ever-popular but dangerously vague net-zero pledge. In theory, a plan to achieve net-zero emissions should involve both reducing emissions and then reaching a sort of equilibrium where any remaining releases are canceled out by removing carbon from the atmosphere.
The problem with net zero is it puts a lot more emphasis on the second part, and doesn’t require much transparency about the first. For example, a clothing brand pledging to achieve net zero by 2050 might buy renewable energy to power its stores, but avoid making more difficult changes to its production process or supply chain to reduce emissions, with the vague intention to balance them out later.
Climeworks is urging companies and governments to instead set two separate targets: One for how much they plan to reduce their carbon output, and a second for the level of remaining emissions they plan to balance out with carbon removal. It’s an idea with roots in academia; a 2019 paper argued that unpacking net-zero goals this way would help ensure that investments in carbon removal are truly additional to essential investments in emissions reductions.
“What we are saying is that removals should not stand as an excuse to not reduce your emissions,” said Louis Uzor, the climate policy manager at Climeworks.
The prospect of removing carbon from the atmosphere is undeniably seductive. “Depending on how you look at things, the technology represents either the ultimate insurance policy or the ultimate moral hazard,” New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in a 2017 story about the kinds of machines that Climeworks is building.
It’s not hard to see how the fantasy version could turn into a nightmare. Our future ability to remove carbon will be limited by all kinds of constraints, like clean energy availability, land use, finance, and community support. If we operate under the assumption that we’ll be able to remove huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere in a few decades, and that capacity doesn’t materialize, we could end up with more catastrophic warming — and still be far off from stabilizing the climate.
“Carbon removal capacity is going to be finite,” said Holly Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo. “Its in our interest to really constrain the residual emissions to the smallest amount possible to make sure that we can, in fact, compensate for them.”
At first glance, it may seem like Climeworks’ manifesto undermines its entire business model. Carbon removal "has a different role to play and should not be substituting emission reductions,” the statement reads. But today, companies like H&M and Square pay Climeworks for carbon removal to compensate for some of their emissions. Even the band Coldplay has bought credits to offset emissions from its tour.
Uzor argues its clients are not purchasing removals in place of cutting emissions. Paying Climeworks to remove carbon is still really expensive — upwards of $600 per metric ton of carbon. “It’s quite obvious that if you can reduce [emissions] for even up to $200 per ton, you’re still better off reducing than going with Climeworks,” he said. Rather, customers are lining up because they have emissions that are considered “hard to abate,” meaning there may not be any way to eliminate them for a long time. Uzor said their clients understand that if they want to achieve net zero in the next few decades, “they better start working with us now, because we have a whole industry that needs to scale up.”
Buck, of the University of Buffalo, pointed out that making it the norm to set a carbon removal goal could actually be great for Climeworks’ business. She’s optimistic that the company’s message comes from a place of genuine concern, but she thinks governments should be the ones leading the way by setting stronger requirements to cut emissions. “If people in the private sector are going to try to basically create policy in the absence of governments doing it, this seems good, but I don't think it’ll solve all the problems.”
Gilles Dufrasne, a lead on global carbon markets at the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch, said his organization supports the ideas in the statement, noting that this clear distinction would bring more transparency to climate plans and progress.
Climeworks’ statement also included a second, related plea. The company wants carbon credit certifiers to distinguish between projects that reduce or avoid emissions, like a wind farm or protection of a forest that might otherwise be chopped down, and those that remove carbon from the atmosphere, like Climeworks’ direct air capture plants. Thus far, Uzor said, Climeworks has refrained from working with large carbon registries like Verra or the American Carbon Registry, where many companies go to buy carbon offsets, because it couldn’t compete in that environment as long as its projects were lumped together with those that reduce emissions, which sell offsets for a fraction of the price.
This is another delicate subject. The growth of carbon removal projects is colliding with major tumult in the carbon market. Traditional carbon offset projects that purport to reduce emissions have been raked over the coals by researchers and journalists who have found time and again that those projects exaggerated their benefits. Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, said that the Science Based Targets Initiative, a nonprofit that creates voluntary standards for corporate climate action, has also begun discouraging companies from buying these kinds of offsets while encouraging investments in carbon removal. “It’s led to this kind of perverse outcome where everyone’s chasing removals,” said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. “Yet if you look at a global level, what we really need to do is reduce emissions rapidly and significantly. So it ends up being a bit of a distraction.”
Uzor said some have opposed the idea to clearly separate removals because it could make them seem like a superior product. But he insisted that wasn’t Climework’s intent. “Currently, global emissions are still on the rise, so any avoided emission that is timely and properly done, based on robust assessment, is massively needed.”
It doesn’t seem like this will end up being such a big ask. Verra, the largest carbon offset registry in the world, plans to introduce a “removals” label in the middle of this year, said Anne Thiel, Verra’s senior manager of communications in an email.
But shoring up the integrity of the market is another question altogether — and one where Climeworks does have a clear advantage. The benefits of a direct air capture project are pretty easy to measure, but other types of carbon removal projects, like those that involve storing carbon in soil or sinking it to the bottom of the ocean, will be a lot harder to verify.
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.