Duncan McLaren, Professor in Practice and Research Fellow at Lancaster University, comes on the show to talk about a paper he cowrote called "Beyond “Net-Zero”: A Case for Separate Targets for Emissions Reduction and Negative Emissions". Alexsandra Guerra hosts and digs into if and how emissions reductions and carbon removals should be treated as distinct activities.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: Hello and welcome to the Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Alexsandra Guerra and I’m here with Nori podcast producer extraordinaire Ross Kenyon. And our guest today is Duncan McLaren from Lancaster University. He’s a research fellow and professor. And he and team wrote a really amazing paper that came across the web first on our desk. And as soon as I saw it on Slack, immediately we all knew and agreed. We had to have Duncan on to talk about this paper that was published in Frontiers and Climate called Beyond Net Zero, a case for separate targets for emissions reduction and negative emissions.
Hiya, Duncan.
Duncan McLaren: Hi, Alexsandra. Great to be with you.
Alexsandra Guerra: So glad to have you here. Ross, you there with us?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m here. I like the hiya. We’re just trying to be real American for you, Duncan, put you in your place a little bit.
Alexsandra Guerra: Exactly. All right. So I briefly explained the topic of this paper by just simply reading the very descriptive title. Duncan, tell us a little bit about this paper and what inspired you and your team to write this.
Duncan McLaren: Well, our work at Lancaster is part of a UK-wide programme on carbon removal. And the whole programme really is about how do we ensure that we can deliver the carbon removal that is needed in the future without it disrupting progress to cut emissions. That’s our research topic. We’ve been working on this for a couple of years. We run nine projects. Deliberative workshops, five of them in the UK, four of them actually using video conferencing technology within international groups to explore what people thought could be or what problems people could see coming up.
And then at the end of each of these meetings, we talked a little about what policy options there were. And one of the things that came up time and time again in these meetings was What’s the idea of separation, of making it much, much clearer when we were aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere as opposed to just trying to cut emissions that stop carbon going into the atmosphere?
Alexsandra Guerra: So let’s elaborate there and give some context for those who are not totally familiar with the policy space or even like the private sector when they say they want to be net zero. What do you mean separation? What are we separating and why hasn’t it been separated?
Duncan McLaren: Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is to look at what has happened when climate modelers look at the future and they say, Oh no, we’re running out of our carbon budget. Either we need to or we need to cut emissions dramatically, but there might still be too much carbon in the atmosphere. We then need to remove some carbon from the atmosphere. And when they run these models and they put carbon removal technologies in coming in the future, what happens is that the models, because they’re designed to optimize costs, They slow down emissions removal in the short term and substitute it with what are still largely imaginary technologies for drawing carbon out of the air towards the end of the century.
And the worst thing was when the first round of modeling was done with all of these, they drew these lovely curves that showed emissions coming down. And then around about 2050, so 30 years out, The line went negative and it looked like then we were starting to do or would be starting to do in 2050 some carbon removal. But actually, all the time between now and then, part of bending down that curve was a hidden amount of carbon removal. So the picture the policymakers got was that, oh, we can put off decisions about this until 2040, that there wasn’t an immediate need to start investing in carbon removal.
But also, at the same time, the picture told them that the speed of emissions reduction could be slower than they thought. Now, what we asked then is, what happens then if the Imaginaries of carbon removal aren’t practical. And in the models, that was normally this idea of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. So you’d produce electricity or heat by using biomass and you capture the carbon off the back end. What we found or what other researchers had already found was that the amount of BECCS, this technology in the models was so great.
That it would probably be impossible to deliver. So the models by merging together emissions reduction and carbon removal had led us into a place where we were relying on an imaginary technology that almost certainly couldn’t be delivered. That we thought was a very bad place.
Alexsandra Guerra: So I’m going to ask a couple of clarifying questions, if I may, because I’m thinking a little bit, I’m hearing two things that at first you started by explaining that the models are designed for cost effectiveness and efficiency. And in the short term, they slow down carbon removals. But then by showing, you know, okay, carbon removals in the outcomes that it’s not included. And then only after 2050 do we get to negative emissions. But then you’re also saying that there are hidden carbon removals in that model that aren’t even described.
And are we confusing through those models? Are we being told that this is carbon reductions when really part of that is carbon removals? Can you clarify that for me?
Duncan McLaren: Yeah. In the way that these models were portrayed, the graphs, the charts we see, It was hard to see that the amount of negative emissions was already growing from 2025 or 2030 because the net line hadn’t crossed zero. So it was just hidden in a general decline. So that’s one thing that was going on. That has been improved. There’s a lot better graphs that the model has produced these days that show the absolute negative emissions as well as the net negative emissions. But The models were also saying that, oh, yeah, we’ve got these technologies in 2070, 2080, 2090, discounted at 3% or 5% a year.
They appear to cost nothing. So in a cost-optimizing model, of course, the model says do more of this and less of the most expensive things. And the most expensive things were by definition or are by definition in a discounting model, the things we would do now or tomorrow. So the model swapped immediate emissions reductions for distant future carbon removal.
Alexsandra Guerra: Hmm. All right. And so let’s go back a little bit. When it comes to the need to separate these, right now, how are they treated the same? Is it because we are incentivizing people the same way to reduce their emissions as we are to, let’s say, draw down CO2 and sequester it?
Duncan McLaren: No, in a sense, I’d say, sadly, we’re not. Well, we’re not really incentivizing people to do either adequately. But the way that we’re beginning to treat them the same is in the policy framework. So, in the UK, for example, we’ve just adopted this net zero target. We say, yeah, we’re going to have emissions at net zero by 2050. Well, does that mean that we’re going to cut our Emissions by, say, 90% and then have negative emissions running at the equivalent of 10% to bring us to a net zero? Or does it mean we’re going to cut our emissions by 60% and then have 40% worth of negative emissions?
Unless it’s very clear that both of those terms are made specific, how much are we going to cut emissions? And then how much negative emissions we have. It’s rather vague and we think potentially misleading. And it gets almost, I mean, the UK has probably done a fairly good job. The Climate Change Committee that we have has published material that indicates the absolute amounts that it thinks these things are going to contribute. But we haven’t as yet said, okay, The policy measures we use to encourage them are going to be appropriate to do that.
And what again worries us is that much of the carbon removal is very expensive right now. What carbon removal needs is sort of quite Significant upfront investments to get it up and running, probably rather more than we need to be spending per tonne of carbon on renewable energy, for instance. And what we found in the past with emissions reduction is that different technologies at different stages of development need targeted support and different levels of support. And there’s a little bit too much Confidence that just, oh, let’s push up the price of carbon and that alone will be enough to deliver what we need.
We think by having these separate targets, it becomes a lot clearer how much investment different forms of carbon removal need to get them going to deliver the levels that we need by 2050 or 2070. And of course, delivering net zero is all well and good. But it is still very likely that there’ll be still too much carbon in the atmosphere and that what we need is a period of net negative. And at least some countries, the rich countries particularly, and some sectors will have to go net negative, not just reach net zero.
Alexsandra Guerra: Precisely. So, and what your point here is, if I’m going to backtrack a little bit, is if we need to not just like, well, yes, let’s meet net zero goals, but we need more than that. We need to be removing more than we are emitting. And in order to do that, we need to have more effective, cost-effective and impactful carbon removal technologies in play. And in order to do that, we need to be able to invest in them. Meaning we need to be able to understand how Do they play right now in the short term, in the long term?
And how much should we be spending in investing on developing those technologies from a policy level and a private sector?
Duncan McLaren: Exactly. All of that. And one additional thing, which is as soon as we start doing that, of course, some actors will go, oh, great. Yeah. I don’t need to cut my emissions now. I can grab it back out of the atmosphere in 50 years’ time.
Unknown speaker: Oh, buddy.
Duncan McLaren: And we need to be able to guard against that too.
Unknown speaker: Absolutely.
Duncan McLaren: Which again is why it’s good to have the targets separate and clear because it means that if people start slacking off on mitigation, we see, we know, we can respond to that. It’s not hidden away in this sort of messy, or is it, Absolutely.
Alexsandra Guerra: And it’s not a mutually exclusive environment where we’re like, okay, we’re just going to reduce our way out of the bag because we just don’t have the technology and resources right now to go completely net zero without some form of carbon removal to make up, let’s say, in that scenario. You mentioned that 10% after we reduced 90%. That’s actually a really good scenario. So to be very clear, I think what you’re saying, and if this is what you’re saying, we totally agree that reductions are important and so are removals, but we have to recognize that they’re two different things to get us to the same goal and understanding how to use them will allow us to better hit those targets.
So for example, a screwdriver and a hammer are both useful to build a house. But not in every case will I use a screwdriver. I technically could hammer and nail with it, but that’s not the purpose. So understand the difference between what your screwdriver is doing for you and what the hammer is doing for you and how to use them appropriately.
Duncan McLaren: I think that’s a really helpful analogy. The other way we try and talk about it is perhaps a little bit counterintuitive because one might think that a tonne of carbon saved by abating emissions today is exactly the same as a tonne of carbon that we can pull out of the atmosphere tomorrow. But the climate doesn’t care where that carbon came from. We hear that quite often. And in one sense, that’s true. But in another sense, it’s a myth. Because if we, for instance, if we abate carbon today, that carbon can’t leak out in 10 years’ time if the geological store stops working or the forest burns down that the carbon removed has been stored in.
So there’s a risk associated with carbon storage that isn’t associated with The abatement of CO2. And then, as I was saying earlier, some of these technologies are still quite imaginary. We think we know how bioenergy with CCS will work. We think we know how even direct air capture will work. But we don’t know for sure that they’re going to work the way we expect. And we particularly don’t know how much of that carbon will be taken by other interests and used in what’s called carbon utilization. Because from our point of view, if you’re removing carbon, that’s only half the job.
Storing it away permanently is the other half of the job. So if a company removes carbon from the air, but then sells it to make synthetic fuel, Or even sells it to go into an oil well in enhanced oil recovery that pumps out more oil. Both of those mean that it’s only effectively a temporary measure. It’s not actually storing that carbon away in the long term. So all those sort of problems mean that a ton of carbon simply captured from the air is Shouldn’t be treated as exactly the same as a ton of carbon that is abated, that is never emitted.
Alexsandra Guerra: Sure. I agree. And I’m going to push back a little bit here because while I agree that we should be recognizing that if I’ve not emitted, then that’s easier. It’s easier for me to not have to clean up a mess if I didn’t do it in the first place. But because we’ve already emitted so much excess CO2 in the atmosphere, we need to be able, like you said earlier, to Remove more than we’re totally emitting. And yes, these technologies that you’re talking about are still in development and some of them more mature than others.
We’re pretty confident in the ability of, let’s say, trees to store CO2. Until, let’s say, a fire comes and burns down that force. And so you need to have some complex mechanisms in a way to ensure that you are paying for both, or you are providing both the carbon removal and the long-term storage. So I’m going to go to a quote in your paper that I highlighted. And you say, What is cheapest to do so in the current market? And then a little later, you say a separate market for negative emissions trading might be considered instead of trading, of having a carbon market that sells both reductions and negative emissions.
Can you expand on why you started talking about this in your paper?
Duncan McLaren: We don’t think it’s a wise idea to trade them in existing markets, especially when you look at something like the European Emissions Trading Scheme, which is designed in such a way that if you simply added carbon removals into it, what you would get by definition would be less mitigation because the market has a cap. And unless you tighten the cap at the same time, then you would have this problem. You would actually be making it easier for people to not mitigate by bringing removals in. That’s assuming that the removals were trading at a price that was competitive on the market.
It may be that they never did. But in that case, they’re not getting any financial incentive to improve the removal technology. So we’re very skeptical of the value of doing it this way. And perhaps one good way of illustrating this would be to say, say your market was paying, I don’t know, 50 pounds a ton or $50 a ton. And people doing tree planting could achieve a ton for $10. So we’re giving tree planters $40 to do nothing. But people doing direct air capture need $100. $50 isn’t enough for them to work.
Wouldn’t it be rather better to allocate the same amount of money in such a way that the tree planters got enough to do what they need to do and the direct air capture team got enough to deliver some direct air capture and start improving that technology?
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s a really good comment, Duncan. And I want to tie it to some feedback we constantly get or questions when we’re meeting with people about carbon removal and the marketplace we’re trying to build. And we do want to ensure that people are paying for both carbon removal and storage, and that ultimately we are achieving the outcome we want, which is a ton of CO2 is removed and stored. And so my question to you is, what would you say to our... Desire to have people pay for carbon removal and storage and retention separate, completely separate.
We don’t sell reductions. And then people say to us a lot of times, like, well, how are you ensuring that they’re reducing? I’m like, I can’t because we’re providing a service for the carbon removal. Oh, well, and the pushback we get back a lot is... Well, if you’re just providing carbon removal, then are you providing people permission to just delay on their mitigations in the short term? I said, no, we fully believe that you need to emit less, remove the rest. And it is our job to make sure that you have a way to confidently say you paid for carbon removal with a transparent and verifiable list of projects on our blockchain that says, yes, this was done and it’s maintained and that carbon storage is maintained and you can continue to pay for that retention.
Duncan McLaren: Yeah, I mean, that’s a really tricky one because in part it’s about a policy question that Norrie itself can’t be expected to resolve, which is about this policy level separation and the firm policy for emissions reduction as well as supportive policy for carbon removal. In the absence of that, it’s sort of a fair criticism because people may well take What you’re doing and say, oh, that does allow us to do something different. And in the paper, we mention Heathrow Airport. Heathrow Airport is paying directly for peat bog restoration so that carbon is being accumulated in peat bogs and stored away.
But they’re using that to offset emissions elsewhere in their operations to claim That they have a carbon neutral airport. It’s not even to offset flights, which are treated separately. It’s just to offset their operational emissions. So it would be hard, I can imagine, for Nori to turn away a corporate client that said, okay, we want to buy carbon removal. But it would also be really hard for you to guarantee that they didn’t then go on making emissions. And this to sort of reassure you that I don’t think it isn’t something you can resolve alone or nor you can resolve alone.
It’s something that does require policy. But this brings us back to the core motivation, which is a recognition that really cutting our emissions to next to nothing, let’s say. There may be some genuinely recalcitrant emissions that we can’t cut to zero, but we can easily push down towards that 90%. Emissions reduction level, probably beyond. But it takes transformations in the way the economy works. It’s not a simple task. We need to transform our steel industry, our cement industry. We certainly need to transform our airline industry. Perhaps our biggest worry about the practice of offsetting generally is that it could be used to slow those things down.
And it takes a strong hand on the policy lever to make sure that it doesn’t.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I’ve got one last question, then we should wrap up here. This is great, Duncan. And so maybe you can enlighten me and point me to some guides that I have not come across. But for me, it almost seems like every industry, it depends on what reductions, carbon reductions, they’ll actually be able to achieve within a given timeframe. Take aviation, for example. While Corsia, the Carbon Offsetting Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, is a market mechanism to get airlines to be carbon neutral growth after 2020, whether it’s by using renewable aviation fuels or by paying for offsets.
And in this one industry, in this vertical, there’s a limit in the resources at any given time that For how much renewable aviation fuel they have, right? How much is coming from a carbon renewable source? And so for me, it would be more helpful in terms of separating outlets. First step is to recognize, yes, reductions are not the same as removals. Two, let’s look at our capacity to do reductions within a given time period. What does the next five years look like? What can we reasonably achieve on a level? Maybe for aviation, it might be 20%, 30% reductions in CO2 emissions using the existing CO2.
And then paint that picture. Where does that bar go down? And then how does that bar go further down? Meaning, you know, if the y-axis is how much you’re emitting in CO2, and if you’re decreasing... You’re able to reduce the total amount of carbon you’re emitting and then the rest between where you’re at and the zero access is how much you would need to remove. That’s not clear. And it sounds like that’s that almost sounds like the whole picture of recognizing where this can be within a certain time frame and how much we need to be investing and doing on each part for, say, five years out, 10 years out and further.
I haven’t come across that. If you have. Please let me know. I’d love to look into that.
Duncan McLaren: No, I haven’t seen something like that. And I’m going to complicate it, I’m afraid, and say what is problematic for me about that is that it also embodies a set of projections about demand. It embodies a set of ideas about how much we are going to want to fly, how much we can see it as reasonable to fly. And those are a set of ideas that even as we say flying becomes more available to more people, flying is still horrendously inequitable. The richest handful of people, the top 10%, top 1%, take the majority of all flights.
I believe it’s that extreme. The Ability of the industry to say, oh, we can achieve carbon neutrality even with growth is in a sense redefining what we mean by genuinely recalcitrant emissions. So I think of genuinely recalcitrant emissions as perhaps I know the nitrous oxide that comes off from using fertilizer to feed people to keep us alive. I don’t treat it as the carbon dioxide that comes out of the back end of an airplane, even though I use airplanes myself. What is genuinely recalcitrant is something that gets redefined when people miss the separation between removals and emissions.
And that’s another reason that we argue for this very clear separation.
Alexsandra Guerra: All right. I mean, that’s fair. I was wanting you to lay out like this roadmap on what are the things we need to do next. But step one, all fair. Let’s just separate and recognize what these two things are.
Duncan McLaren: Let me chip in one thing more that may help you at the end. Just to say, separation was the first big thing that came out of our deliberative workshops. We’re working right now on analysing all the rest of the suggestions and we’ll be writing another paper, so there’ll be more to come. Watch this space. We do have other ideas that we just need to analyse better first. Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: All right. So then maybe we’ll have to have you come back onto the Carbon Removal Newsroom and share with us what you find next on this journey.
Duncan McLaren: Great. I’d love to join you again.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thanks so much, Duncan, for joining us. Really a pleasure. I’m holding myself back because there’s so much more to discuss, but hopefully we can continue the conversation again soon.
Duncan McLaren: Indeed. It’s been great joining you.
Alexsandra Guerra: Bye-bye.
Duncan McLaren: Bye.
