This week on Carbon Removal Newsroom, we’re discussing carbon’s value in various forms. We start by answering the question, ‘What is carbon pricing?’ and look at proposed bills in Congress that are attaching a price to carbon. We look at the value of forest carbon offsets in a world with unprecedented wildfires. We explore A Progressive Platform For Carbon Removal, then we close out the episode with a positive story of the week.
Panelists Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition join host Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori for this episode.
Resources
The energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act
America’s Clean Future Fund Act
A policy framework for achieving negative emissions (VoxEU)
Operationalizing The Net Negative Carbon Economy (Nature)
Wildfires are ravaging forests set aside to soak up greenhouse gases (The New York Times)
2021 North American Wildfire Season
A Progressive Platform for Carbon Removal (Data for Progress)
Activists Call It A ‘False Solution.’ But UN Scientists Say We Need To Suck Up CO2 (The Huffington Post)
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the August 26th edition of Carbon Removal Newsroom. As always, I am joined with Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo. Hello, Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: Hello, Radhika. Hi, Chris.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Chris Barnard, Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition. Hey, Chris.
Chris Barnard: Hey, Radhika. How are you doing?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Good. I don’t know why your title was so tongue tying for me today. And I am Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So today we’re going to kind of talk about carbon values in various forms, some proposed bills in the US Congress that are attaching a price to carbon. And the value of a carbon offset in a world with unprecedented wildflowers. And maybe how progressives would move forward and approach around carbon removal after years of kind of being a little distant from the idea. So we will start off with the carbon pricing bills that are currently before Congress.
Maybe, Chris, you can provide us an overview. They’re sure a lot. So brief is nice. But tell us what’s going on.
Chris Barnard: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I’ll just quickly start maybe with what the concept of carbon pricing is and why it’s kind of gaining traction. A lot of economists think that the most efficient and the fastest way to tackle climate change is to put price on carbon, which is, in other words, a tax on carbon, where polluters would pay a certain amount of money per tonne of carbon that they emit into the atmosphere. And so that’s getting a lot of traction. Obviously, yes, climate change is an issue that’s increasingly On the top of the political agenda.
And so there’s a bunch of bills that have been introduced this congressional cycle that would put a price on carbon, and then that price would essentially rate rise every single year to And so a few of the examples are the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, which is the most broadly supported one. I think it has 80 or 81 co-sponsorships. And then there’s other ones like America’s Clean Future Fund Act, the Climate Action Rebate Act. There’s one interesting one, which is the Market Choice Act, because that one does have a bipartisan co-sponsorship.
But I mean, there’s a bunch of different names for a bunch of different bills. So I’m not going to talk through all of them, but the Most important takeaway is the fact that there seems to be growing kind of interest in using carbon pricing, carbon taxes as a way to tackle climate change. And so more and more bills are being introduced in Congress to try and introduce that kind of mechanism to tackle climate change.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so Chris, you know, curious about your perspective, particularly maybe around the energy innovation and carbon dividend, which You know, like you said, has 79 co-sponsors, none of which are Republicans. But how do you like this approach? Essentially, it’s the idea that there would be a fee put on emitters and then that fee would be passed back to the U. S. citizen as a dividend that they believe would offset the higher prices caused by the fee.
Chris Barnard: So I think that when approaching this issue of carbon taxes and carbon pricing, you have to bear into account two different approaches. There’s the kind of theoretical economic kind of ideal approach, and then there’s the actual political approach and what the reality is. And so from this kind of theoretical perspective, it’s true, like the vast majority of economists say that the most effective and efficient way to tackle climate change would be by Putting a price signal into the market that would encourage polluters to actually stop polluting and to reduce their carbon output.
And that would be very elegant. And the models show that it would help tackle climate change. And you have a lot of economists on both the right and the left that say it’s the best option, et cetera, et cetera. And I can’t argue with the kind of economic theory behind that. But the problem is that elegant Economics don’t necessarily make good politics. And the reality is that carbon pricing just does not have much political support at all. There’s some polls show that Americans are in favor of it. But then when asked about whether they would be willing to pay $10 a month extra to tackle climate change, 95% of Americans say no.
So there’s a question of to what extent do these polls actually reflect people’s accurate understanding of what carbon pricing is. And then purely in Congress, there’s Not even enough support amongst a Democratic caucus, let alone bipartisan support to pass a significant enough bill on this issue. So I think it really is one of those things that in kind of in an ideal world, it would work very well, but the political reality doesn’t seem to reflect that quite yet.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. And Holly, how do you feel about it? I mean, I think, right, one of the Generalized critiques of often these fees, it ends up being passed along to the consumer and the people most impacted are always the people at the lowest end of the economic ladder. And so curious if you think this approach of charging fees and then providing a dividend addresses that concern, maybe even at a high level, even if it’s not necessarily politically feasible today to do.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, I think that groups like Citizens Climate Lobby have been talking about the carbon fee and dividend for a long time. I think fee polls better than tax. I don’t know. We’ve just been talking about this all for so long. I think when it comes to carbon removal, there are some fundamental challenges where The, you know, imagine carbon tax schemes and emissions trading schemes. They both have been thought about with positive emissions in mind. They haven’t been, you know, integrated with thinking about negative emissions. And I would might refer readers to a relatively recent comment in Nature called operationalizing the net negative carbon economy, which frankly is a bit over my head at some points.
But if you’re into economics and thinking about how What we have now can be leveraged towards carbon removal, why it doesn’t really work for carbon removal, what else we could do. That’s one good paper.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and I guess what I’m struggling with is why we’re making it, again, as I say this all the time, so complicated. I mean, isn’t one of the biggest critiques of the oil and gas industries, they have tonnes and tonnes of subsidies, so rather than Charging them a fee, why not just remove the subsidies? Is it politically unfeasible?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good point. I think it’s certainly something that I’m very much in favor of. I think two kind of rebuttals there would be the first one, somebody that would be in favor of this kind of mechanism would say that, well, the damage has already been done, right? They’ve been Propped up and they’ve given such a competitive advantage over the rest of the energy market for decades that there needs to be something that counterbalances that and in their mind that would be. A carbon fee and I’m not saying yes or no to that, but there are the argument is that there needs to be a counterbalance because the market has been so distorted for decades.
Anyway, the second thing is really the point of a carbon tax from as far as I understand is not so much punishment, but more. Pushing the market in a certain direction, right? And the whole point of that is to actively incentivize companies, polluters, individuals, etc. , entrepreneurs to pursue the best energy solutions that would not incur that penalty. And so I’m not sure if just removing subsidies would be As far reaching within that kind of framework of wanting a carbon tax as kind of the active stick of you will pay more if you emit more.
And if you don’t emit by getting better technologies, then they have direct incentive to do that. Whereas just removing subsidies does not automatically mean that there’s a bigger incentive for more battery storage development or nuclear or whatever else it is. So I think that those would be kind of two rebuttals to the let’s just get rid of subsidies argument from that side.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, I totally see that. I guess what I have a hard time visualizing with this and probably is my naive perspective is that you charge them a fee, they pass the fee along to the consumer, the consumer gets a dividend back, but there’s no like real incentive to change because they’re not paying more for the action that they’re doing is I understood the bill. You know, at its very simplistic form. So I didn’t quite grasp where the incentive was coming from unless they’re tying it to something that I just misunderstood.
And when I argue to remove subsidies, I would also argue that you should subsidize other things to make them more cost effective and more attractive to these so they do start pivoting it. I agree with you, Chris, just removing the subsidies certainly is not enough as incentive to Reverse the many, many decades and centuries of us incentivizing these carbon polluters. But anyway.
Chris Barnard: I guess the economic kind of argument behind that, they’re not paying more relative to their previous costs simply because they’re passing the costs on to consumers and the consumers get a rebate regardless. So you’re right. In relative terms to themselves, they’re not paying more all of a sudden. But the point of a carbon price in that system would be that they’re paying more relative to their competitors that might innovate. So if all of a sudden competitors find a way to stop emitting and pay a lot less in taxes every year, that means they don’t have to raise their prices.
So that means consumers will flock to them rather than to the original polluters. And so in such a system, you have a huge competitive relative advantage over your competitors, even though You’ve not actually paid more yourself. The others are just paying less.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, yeah. No, I see that. I guess what I don’t see is that there’s any necessarily natural link that others would innovate somehow unless there’s some other incentive to do it. Because if you’re all starting from the same place, why innovate if you’re not getting forced to pay more? Yeah. Time will tell, right? I don’t know. We’ll see whether this even moves forward with only 79, you know, I mean, obviously 79 co-sponsors, but it does not appear to have bipartisan support unless Chris knows something that we don’t.
Chris Barnard: I’m afraid I don’t.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So with that, you know, another very hot area in sort of carbon pricing, carbon removal is this idea of carbon offsets and As most of our listeners I’m sure know, I live in the West where the wildfires are acute. But for the rest of our listeners, just some numbers. As of August 23rd, the National Interagency Fire Center’s Situation Report listed a total of 41,197 wildfires across the country, burning close to 4. 6 million acres, which is kind of a mind-boggling situation. Number and that there are 20 over 26,000 personnel deployed on 93 large active fires across the US and 92 are uncontained.
So, and to date 41 that almost just over 40,000 fires have burned night 5. 19 million acres and why is this all relevant to this conversation, because what many companies use our forest carbon offsets to. So Chris, can you kind of give us an idea of what a forced carbon offset is and what’s going on in that world?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, it’s honestly a pretty simple concept, and I think we’ve talked about it here in the past. But essentially, companies that want to offset the carbon emissions related to the company’s existence will buy a carbon force offset credit, which means that they essentially give money to a project to save carbon. A particular forest that emits, that sucks a certain amount of carbon out of the air each year. And in doing so, they’re kind of reducing their net carbon footprint. And so a lot of companies from Microsoft to BP to Google to Apple Pay forest projects to essentially protect the forest and make sure it doesn’t get cut down so that more carbon emissions are taken out of the atmosphere and help tackle climate change.
Obviously, wildfires don’t necessarily respect what is a conserved forest versus what is just a regular forest. And so there have been a lot of problems with forests that have been paid for to be conserved by these companies are actually being burnt down because of some of these wildfires. And so it’s kind of opening a bit of a can of worms because are these companies actually now reducing their emissions in that sense or not, because the project they’re putting money towards is literally going up in flames. So one of the questions there is how do we create better insurance policies to make sure that we do that?
And also just it ties into a broader question of how do wildfires fit into the fight against climate change? Last year, wildfires emitted, I think, 25 or 30 percent more carbon dioxide in the state of California than the actual fossil fuel production did in the state. So wildfires are actually contributing pretty significantly to climate change and we’re not doing all that much about it quite yet. So I think it just opens up a very interesting reverse kind of topic about carbon removal because you’d be preventing carbon removal by stopping wildfires.
So I think it’s just a very topical issue for us to kind of think about and discuss in the kind of space of carbon removal and stopping carbon from actually being emitted.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and just to be clear, Microsoft, who is kind of a leader in this space and has made a huge commitment in terms of carbon removal and going to net negative, basically, their offsets burnt in Southern Oregon at the wildfire. I can’t remember the name of the fire, but at one of the largest fires of this year. And while they play an important role in carbon removal, the one thing you touched upon, Chris, that I want to expand on a little bit is the whole idea of the insurance pool. So with carbon offsets, generally these programs are designed so that you have basically a reserve of offsets that are placed into an insurance pool at the most in a simplistic level.
And then if There’s a release of carbon. The idea is that these would cover that release. Unfortunately, with the level of catastrophic fires we’ve had, the insurance pool is just not big enough to make up the difference. Holly, kind of curious from your perspective, what you think of this whole forest carbon issue. I know it’s very popular with both the public and generally environmental groups. But how do you address an issue like this or think about it?
Holly Jean Buck: I think that I’m wondering about the assumptions of this insurance, this buffer pool, as it’s called. Because my understanding is that right now these offsetting schemes contribute about 10% to 20% of the credits they generate to this buffer pool. And this is all tracked. California is considered to have a good buffer pool. With a bunch of different projects in it. But like, what are the climate change assumptions of that? Do we need to increase what that is? Is that going to actually fix the underlying issues? I don’t know, because I mean, like you said that these fires are a serious problem for scale, 4.
6 million acres so far. That’s like A bit bigger than Connecticut, a bit smaller than New Jersey. For people in Europe, you can think of an area slightly smaller than half the size of Switzerland. I mean, and it’s going to probably, you know, continue or worsen. So I think that maybe we’ll see other actors shifting away from afforestation towards engineered solutions if those are seen to be more reliable or mature. I don’t know. I hope we can kind of Be more cautious about cheap forest offsets in the future.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so Holly, I think you also just nailed an important point that they’re cheap, right? And actually, they should not maybe be as cheap as they are because in the system we’ve designed, we’ve clearly not created enough of an insurance pool and forest management practices, which is related but not directly tied to climate change, have also Well, we’ll also probably result in these continuing large fires even if we get climate change in totally, if overnight we snapped our fingers and got climate change figured out because of the long time policy of not doing slow controlled burn.
So we also have this whole other policy piece that needs to be addressed before you can make maybe these carbon, forest carbon offsets worthwhile. You know, Chris, I guess I’m curious from your perspective, What you would do to address this issue or if you have thoughts on a policy or perspective that would help mitigate around the burning of forced carbon.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about is that we need a lot better forest management and wildfire management to prevent some of these fires from happening. And there’s been over a century, really, in many places in the West, especially California, Of what they call fire suppression tactics is they had this kind of preservationist perspective on nature and soft fires as completely inherently antithetical to that. And so they did a lot of things that actually were very counterproductive, such as not removing underbrush or refusing to take out dead trees or from burning little areas to make sure that they That a bigger wildfire couldn’t just come through and use everything as tinder and things like that.
And those are actually practices that have been used by native tribes around the world to make sure that nature is kind of actively conserved rather than just preserved and left alone. And so over the last hundred years, more and more kind of fuel has been built up in areas. And obviously humans have kind of encroached more and more on nature. And so Still like climate change impacts fires, but 90% of fires are actually started by humans and climate change helps create the conditions for it, but still a lot of humans kind of getting closer and encroaching more on nature, and so we’re reaching a point And I think that’s the point where you have like electricity cables that might spark a fire or humans being too close or a stray ember from a chimney or something like that, which is causing these fires and all this timber and this underground.
And so there’s, there needs to be a lot more forest management in the sense of controlled mini fires, carried out by the Forest Service to make sure that areas are in the same way. And so there needs to be a lot more forest management in the sense of controlled mini fires, carried out by the Forest Service to make sure This overgrowth and underbrush gets removed so that it’s not potentially dangerous. Forest thinning is another one. And there’s a really cool video on Twitter showing a fire trying to get through a thin forest and it just couldn’t because the trees were spaced apart in a very smart way.
And it’s better to have trees spaced apart than a forest that is very densely packed together that then all of a sudden is no longer a forest after a fire comes through it. So there’s a lot of different forest management things that have to be That has to be done proactively rather than just leaving nature as it is.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, go ahead, Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I just wanted to add that, I mean, a smart approach would be to integrate fuel management with a carbon removal lens so you can think about using that forest residue for biochar, for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. And Dan Sanchez at UC Berkeley and his lab have been doing some great research on How to look at this whole nexus for optimizing for wildfire risk reduction alongside these other things.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I think both Chris and I would give you the thumbs up on that idea. That’s fantastic. Two things that I, you know, want to leave listeners thinking about as this topic, as we exit this topic is one, even though this is not related directly to the show. California also has a housing crisis, so the building of affordable housing and the need for different zoning is going to abut exactly against kind of what Chris has been talking about and humans coming up against the boundaries. So California really has a lot of interesting policy questions to answer and has an opportunity to be a real leader in the space, I think.
And the other thing I would say is My concern is that as these force burn and companies like Microsoft lose the value of their offsets, that it will ripple out to nature-based solutions of all sorts. And so to the extent that labs like the one you just mentioned, Holly, and other groups can figure out efficient solutions to dealing with this, I think it’s in all of our best interests because I don’t want the nature-based solutions to get forgotten or panned Just because they didn’t work perfectly as originally designed and that they get better over time and we figure these things out.
With that, I’m going to turn to our final topic today, which is the progressive wing of the environmental movement has often sort of been Wary of carbon removal, or maybe just generally the environmental movement has been wary of carbon removal, but I think that’s been changing. And so maybe Holly, you can kind of tell us what’s going on in that world and why there’s been this change of heart.
Holly Jean Buck: Well, it might be too soon to say there’s a change of heart, but I would say that there’s a robust discussion. I mean, on one hand, some of the critique is louder than ever, but on the other hand, um, Some groups are thinking about what a progressive version of carbon removal would look like. And to that end, the think tank Data for Progress released a series of reports recently, including guiding principles for a progressive carbon removal platform, federal policy suggestions, and also some polling showing support and interest for carbon removal.
I guess one of the central principles is that, you know, a progressive net negative emission strategy, as they say, must not serve as an excuse to continue reliance on fossil fuels, nor to deter swift bold transitions away from our petrocarbon economy, which is pretty much like the main progressive concern with carbon removal. But, you know, some of the more specific points they talk about are You know, having separate targets for negative emissions and mitigation, the US should contribute its fair share to global negative emissions needs and promote fairness at home.
And they talk about how federal investments in carbon removal should prioritize a public option. So some of those are some of the high level thoughts around what that might look like.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Holly, I’m curious about why some of the critiques are still louder than ever, I think, with the phrase you used when it seems like the most recent IPCC report indicated this isn’t a nice to have, this is a need to have kind of to mitigate climate change.
Holly Jean Buck: Because you have people like Marc Jacobson having webinars saying that 100% renewables are gonna get us there and, you know, DAC is terrible and he is a scientist in a high level position and people say, oh, that’s the science, frankly. Rather than that’s an opinion.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that’s interesting. So Chris, I was curious what you thought of this progressive proposal. I mean, when I read it, I thought it was Pretty pragmatic, pretty, you know, seem pretty in line with most of the stuff we talk about, but curious if you had different thoughts or a critique of your own.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, I think broadly speaking, the fact that there is a progressive platform to kind of push for carbon removal solutions from a technological perspective is already pretty good because as you guys were saying, there really is kind of an internal battle in the movement between People that are kind of embracing the technology and people that are rejecting it as a way to prop up fossil fuels for longer and things like that. Whereas the IPCC is very clear, we needed to get there, as you said, Radhika. So, I mean, I predictably, obviously I’ll have some pretty significant policy disagreements with the data, the Center for Progress.
That’s what they’re called, right? Data for Progress?
Holly Jean Buck: Data for Progress.
Chris Barnard: Data for Progress and so obviously I’ll have some disagreements from a political perspective and how to get there and kind of what the incentives should be for like for the private sector versus kind of just direct investment but. Broadly speaking, I do think that the idea of investing more in innovation through the national labs and R amp D through the Department of Energy is a good idea. So I would just say that it’s a positive and a net win in the sense of they’re talking about it and hopefully we can move beyond the fake climate solution rhetoric.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Polly, how has this report been received within the rest of the community? Is it sparking debate? Is it causing people to rethink their positions or is it too soon to tell?
Holly Jean Buck: I think it’s too soon to tell. I mean, there have been a few discussions Alexander Kaufman at Huffington Post wrote a piece discussing it. But we’ll see what the eventual impact is. I hope people take the argument seriously.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And I’m just curious, now that this report is written, who will, do you think, carry the ball to start implementing some of these policy ideas? And maybe you can touch briefly on a couple of the main policy ideas that they had in this report.
Holly Jean Buck: Um, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, they have recommendations for different agencies and some of it fits within, you know, the American Jobs Plan, things we’ve been hearing about. I think a lot of it is actually pretty consonant with what’s been put on the table by the administration so far. Yeah, I mean, in terms of the federal action plan, they’re talking about things about, you know, Increasing tax credits for direct air capture with geologic storage. One place where they diverge from some of the stuff that’s been on the table is they reject enhanced oil recovery.
So that’s one big difference from the legislation we’ve heard about already.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking. It seemed like it was actually not very far off from what has been proposed, except for that enhanced oil recovery, obviously, piece. The other thing I found interesting was the, which I had never really considered as they highlight the fact that because we’ve depleted so much, there’s this like real great opportunity to restore stuff and create geologic storage in areas like Appalachia and stuff. And I just thought that seems like an interesting idea to run with because then it’s a different type of job provider.
It’s like inverse coal creation or something. I don’t know what you’d call it, but like that’s Ties their heritage to something new and important to be done. And they have a lot of land there. So the solutions around DAC, which usually involve a lot of land, a lot of permitting, might work well. And so I hope that one of the other solutions, right, they were talking about, or maybe it’s already in these bills, it’s these like incentive zones or DAC creation zones. And I’m hoping maybe they cite some of those in the Appalachia region because it seems pretty cool to me.
With that, I’m going to wrap it up and ask Holly for maybe some good news or interesting news or something you want to highlight for the week.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I’m going to highlight a social science study that found some good news out of University of New England. Megan Daly and others found that coverage in major print media outlets now largely reflects the scientific consensus about the human cause of climate change and it’s getting more accurate over time. So they’ve analyzed articles from the last 15 years and found that’s getting better. It’s less of a both sides reporting of climate change, more accurate with the consensus. And just as a personal anecdote, I was reading a story on Fox News about the fires, and it had an ending about scientists think that climate change is going to worsen fires.
So, I mean, we’re getting there.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, Chris, I couldn’t quite catch that. Say that again?
Chris Barnard: I was saying it’s working, what we’re trying to do at ACC is working.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s what I was going to say, actually, Chris, is that you need to go and start Telling those older members of your party, look, even Fox thinks that climate change is real. Maybe that will stop them bringing snowballs to the House set floor or Senate floor. I don’t know. Well, with that, thank you everybody for listening to us this week. I really appreciate it. Holly, Chris, as always, lovely to have you on and have a wonderful rest of the week. And to everybody else, have a great weekend and we will see you soon.
Thanks a lot. Bye.
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