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Practical Magic

Dear Joe Biden: Please make the most of bipartisan support for carbon removal

“Negative emissions” technologies are specifically called out under the innovation portion of the President-elect's platform, the first time the category has gotten that kind of focused attention.

President-elect Joe Biden in Iowa
President-elect Joe Biden during a May 2020 campaign appearance in Des Moines, Iowa.

The corporate focus on supporting carbon removal solutions — natural or tech-engineered — has intensified this year, particularly across companies from the food, consumer products and technology sectors. Things are guaranteed to heat up even more in 2021, given the rare bipartisan support this idea seems to enjoy on Capitol Hill.

Irish digital payments company Stripe, one of the world’s most valuable startups, gets my vote for one of the most aggressive strategies to draw down atmospheric CO2 — it is putting at least $1 million annually into new approaches and innovation. And now, support for industrial policies centered on carbon removal are likely to play a central role of the incoming Biden-Harris administration. 

"Negative emissions" technologies are specifically called out under the innovation portion of President-elect Joe Biden’s climate change platform. It’s the first time the category has gotten that kind of attention from a presidential candidate. For that reason, it didn’t surprise me to hear that Carbon180 co-founder and Executive Director Noah Deich, currently on leave from the organization, is a volunteer on the transition team for the Department of Energy.

Carbon180 has plenty of suggestions for where the Biden White House should focus its energy and for how various federal agencies, particularly the DoE and the Department of Agriculture, can collaborate to cultivate new economic opportunities centered on carbon removal.

The ideas offered in the advocacy group’s Transition Book have very little to do with carbon pricing or taxes or cap-and-trade programs, and a whole lot to do with funding research and development, establishing incentives to encourage their use (such as the 45Q tax credit) and creating regulations to encourage the rise of entire new industries, such as the carbontech products that I wrote about last month.

Carbon removal and negative emissions technologies enjoy rare bipartisan and bicameral support in Washington, D.C.

I chatted with Carbon180’s co-founder and managing director, Giana Amador, for the GreenBiz 350 podcast. The full interview will air Dec. 4. Meanwhile, here are three of my takeaways from the discussion.

Watch for far more funds for R&D, innovation. Prior to fiscal year 2020, Congress had appropriated only $11.5 million for direct air capture technology. For fiscal year 2021, the DoE received $95 million in R&D for negative emissions technology, along with $239.5 million for "additional relief provisions for demonstrations of negative emissions technologies and interagency collaboration." 

Carbon180’s suggestion for the incoming president: Create a "CarbonShot" innovation program that cultivates solutions through both the DoE and the USDA over the next decade and supported with $10 billion in appropriations during that time frame. Let’s be clear: Agricultural work, as well as work with the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, are included in this push. 

$100 is the magic number. One goal of any R&D and incentives should be to get the carbon removal price below $100 per ton of CO2 removed. While some land-based approaches cost as little as $10 to $30, the transaction processes remain confusing and verification — including vetting projects to make sure sequestration is permanent — is challenging, Amador noted. 

"Especially around the tech-based carbon removal solutions, we really see cost as a major barrier to deployment today," she said. "So we want to continue to bring down the technology cost both through technology learning and economies of scale to get the price — particularly, I think, for direct air capture — down to below $100 per ton of CO2. That’s what we really think is going to be necessary to deploy these solutions on the scale that’s needed to fight climate change."

Environmental justice and economic empowerment should be central to any policy. Take the case of regenerative agriculture. The emphasis should be on making sure these practices are good for farmers’ bottom lines, helps improve their resilience and helps them prepare for the potential effects of climate change on their livelihoods. "We really place a big emphasis both on environmental justice and on the labor considerations around these solutions," Amador said. 

To be clear, these ideas (and far more than I can mention here) are what’s on the wish list of carbon removal advocates such as Carbon180. The Biden administration has plenty of fixing to do when it comes to reestablishing U.S. environmental policy, and plenty of priorities are vying for attention — a renewed push for clean energy innovation, support for zero-emission transportation and so on. 

But the economic opportunities associated with carbon removal and negative emissions technologies enjoy rare bipartisan and bicameral support in Washington, D.C. So there is definitely reason for optimism that quick and early progress during the Biden administration is on the horizon.

"I think there is really just so much momentum that has solidified carbon removal as a central tenet of climate action," Amador said.

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