What’s next for carbon removal?

“Credible assurance that a project’s declared ton of carbon savings equates to an actual ton of emissions removed, reduced, or avoided is critical,” Cynthia Giles, a senior EPA adviser under President Biden, and Cary Coglianese, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a recent op-ed. sciences. “However, extensive research in many contexts shows that auditors who are selected and paid by the organizations being audited often produce results skewed toward those entities’ interests.”

Noah McQueen, director of science and innovation at Carbon180, stressed that the industry must strive to confront increasing credibility risks, noting in a recent LinkedIn post: “Growth is important, but growth without integrity is no growth at all.”

In an interview, McQueen said overcoming the problem will require developing and enforcing standards to ensure carbon removal projects deliver the promised climate benefits. To gain trust, McQueen added, the industry needs to gain buy-in from the communities in which these projects are built and avoid the environmental and health impacts that power plants and heavy industry have historically inflicted on underserved communities.

Getting it right will require governments to play a bigger role in the sector than just subsidizing it, says David Ho, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who focuses on removing carbon from the oceans.

He says there has to be a massive, multinational research campaign to determine the most effective ways to clear the atmosphere with the least amount of environmental or social damage, likening it to the Manhattan Project (without the whole nuclear bomb part).

“If we’re serious about doing this, let’s make it a government effort, so you can try all the things, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and you don’t have to please venture capitalists or focus on development,” he says. [intellectual property] So you can sell yourself to a fossil fuel company.”

He adds that there is a moral duty on the world’s biggest climate polluters historically to build and finance the carbon capture and storage infrastructure needed to draw out billions of tons of greenhouse gases. This is because the world’s poorest and hottest countries, which have contributed the least to climate change, will nonetheless face the greatest risks from increasing heatwaves, drought, famine, and sea level rise.

“This should be seen as managing the waste that we will be dumping on the global South, because they are the people who will suffer the most from climate change,” he says.

Correction (October 24): An earlier version of this article referred to Noya as a decarbonization marketplace. It was a live aerial capture company.