As CDR’s notoriety increases, so too does the scrutiny upon it. Carbon removal companies are beginning to deploy in communities, and are facing local concerns about the effect their projects will have communities. As these companies work to communicate the benefits of their projects, a CDR trade group is announcing a new program to help companies responsibly deploy carbon removal.
Scrutiny of CDR continues in the press as well.
An article from Reuters tracked the growing effort to standardize and legitimize CDR as startups and marketplaces try to attract large corporate buyers, showing that the industry is now front and center on business pages worldwide.
And the year’s biggest climate event is around the corner. A group of CDR organizations, including one led by today’s guest, are working to ensure the industry is ready as the global climate spotlight prepares to turn on them. The debates over CDR at COP28 will surely be contentious, and we’ll hear about a new effort to make the carbon removal community ready for when that happens.
Locally, and globally, from communities to newsrooms to international bodies, CDR is under scrutiny like never before. In this episode, we’re discussing what the industry can do to respond and continue to grow.
On this episode we’re joined today by Ben Rubin, the Carbon Business Council’s Executive Director, a trade organization representing over 100 CDR businesses. Welcome, Ben.
We’re also joined by our regular policy panelist, Susan Su, a partner focused on climate investing at TOBA Capital. She also serves as a board member of the Carbon Business Council and a board advisor to the Environmental Voter Project.
On This Episode
Resources
Confidence Ebbs in Carbon Markets- article
Study: 13% of Renewable Projects that Face Opposition are Completed
“Three Big Letters in CDR are MRV”
Our Episode with Sebastian Manhart
Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous
My other show, Reversing Climate Change
Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop
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.
Asa Kamer: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. Radhika, your regular host, is out this week, so I’m going to be taking over. As your host, my name is Asa Kamer. I’m the producer of the show. So as CDR’s notoriety increases, so too does the scrutiny. Carbon removal companies are beginning to deploy and are facing concerns about the effects their projects will have on local communities. As these companies work to communicate the benefits of their projects, a CDR trade group is announcing a new program to help companies responsibly deploy carbon removal. Today, we’re going to talk about that program with Ben Rubin, the ED of the Carbon Business Council, the organization launching what they’re calling the Responsible Deployment Training.
Scrutiny of CDR continues in the press as well. An article from Reuters recently tracked the growing effort to standardize and legitimize CDR as startups and marketplaces tried to attract large corporate buyers, showing that the industry is now front and center on business pages worldwide. And the year’s biggest climate event is around the corner. A group of CDR organizations, including one led by today’s guests, are working to ensure the industry is ready as the global climate spotlight prepares to turn on them. The debates over CDR at COP28 will surely be contentious, and we’ll hear about a new effort to make the carbon removal community ready when that happens.
Locally and globally, from communities to newsrooms to international bodies, CDR is under scrutiny like never before. In this episode, we’re discussing what the industry can do to respond and continue to grow. We’re joined today by Ben Rubin, the Carbon Business Council’s Executive Director, a trade organization representing over 100 CDR businesses. Welcome, Ben.
Ben Rubin: Thank you so much for having me here.
Asa Kamer: Great to have you. We’re also joined by a regular business panelist, Susan Hsu, a partner focused on climate investing at Toba Capital. She also serves as a board member of the Carbon Business Council and a board advisor to the Environmental Voter Project. Welcome, Susan.
Susan Su: Thanks. Great to be here as usual.
Asa Kamer: Wonderful. All right, Ben, so I’m going to start with you. I’d like to talk about the responsible deployment of carbon removal program. So can you tell us a little bit about it? What prompted it and how was it put together?
Ben Rubin: Thank you so much for having me here today and happy to start by talking a little bit more about CDRRDT, the Carbon Dioxide Removal Responsible Deployment Training. CDRRDT is an online course that talks about introductory and foundational concepts for community engagement and the responsible deployment of carbon removal. And it’s paired with a series of resources about how companies can think about first steps to begin community engagement. And your question is about how did this come together? One thing that I would say is frequently the carbon removal industry is compared to the solar industry, where solar was some time ago before solar has scaled up to now.
We hear comparisons on the cost of solar and how that fell. But I think one comparison. That resonates as it relates to community engagement is a stat that strikes me is, according to a research article that came out in Science Direct, research shows that only 13% of renewable energy projects with local opposition end up being completed once they face an issue.
Asa Kamer: Ben, I think our listeners are probably pretty familiar with why Community engagement is important. Can you tell us about the how? What sort of practices, techniques, protocols are you encouraging or educating companies to do in terms of actually winning over local community support? What are the best practices?
Ben Rubin: Yeah, great question. We convened an advisory committee of experts to help answer that question and work with a really broad range of stakeholders to help address what are those frameworks? What does the existing literature say? What are those best practices? What can we learn about from other sectors in the space to pull that together and apply it to carbon removal? I think A couple of things to highlight here. One is that there’s not a single silver bullet. The work is challenging. It’s complex. There’s not one single way to do it.
And because that work is complex, because the work is challenging, we landed on creating the online course focuses primarily on introductory concepts. It’s foundational. It’s first steps for how to begin. I think great for the listeners who are attuned to the benefits of community engagement and why it’s important for project deployment. We also started covering the concepts of why community engagement matters and didn’t want to take that as a given, talking about what it means to be a good community stored, the history of communities in the U. S. and communities that have been most impacted by climate change and what it means if projects are being deployed there or if projects are being deployed Anywhere in the US and how local cultural fabrics and other considerations might relate to project design.
And then as the training builds, the online course has eight different modules. We start talking more about those best practices and ways to begin. It’s all jam-packed in the training. And so it’s tough to summarize it down to a couple of sentences. But I think a couple of things that I would highlight is Really making sure to understand a community early in the process. Talk with the community, begin community engagement early, and make sure that it is a two-way dialogue with the community. Hear about what concerns a community might have, hear about what community needs there might be, so that a project developer can start to identify What are the ways that we can ensure that a project is going to be directly aligned and meet a community where they are?
And then we also talk a little bit more about community benefit agreements in the training, which is a way to help codify and actually write down and translate into action what it means to be a community stored and how a project will function and operate in a community and what benefits a community will receive from it.
Asa Kamer: Susan, in your work, I know that you evaluate CDR startups. You look at climate tech companies. What measures are they taking to ensure that their operations are socially responsible? How aware would you say are climate startups about this dimension right now?
Susan Su: This is a question that’s broadly relevant to all technology companies working across any sector. Technology of any kind, whether it’s the first steam train or the first coil tubing operation, Fracking rig or whether it’s the first direct air capture facility just has massive community and even broader societal implications wherever it goes. And I think it’s a question that many technology companies don’t ask nearly enough, period, across the board. Now, when we’re talking about CDR startups, I think it’s interesting that we’re even having this conversation because it feels like Maybe similar to what was experienced in solar.
It feels like we hold them to a very high standard that we don’t even apply to. Well, let’s just say who was asking social responsibility questions when Uber or Airbnb first rolled out? Not many people. And that’s because most companies, when they’re very early stage, are so far from The reality of truly scale deployment that people tend not to people, meaning investors, operators, team members, founders, other stakeholders really tend not to think too much about all of that down the line stuff. For some reason, when it comes to climate companies, we ask these questions.
We start kind of asking them to own these questions a lot earlier in their process. And I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because they’re solving this collective action problem that is climate change. I’m not going to comment on whether I think that’s fair or not, but I will say that for early stage companies and the investors that look at them, like me, we’re mostly still focused on, does this technology work? Can it scale? Is there a commercial path that’s viable? Do you have a path to fundraising viability throughout all of that?
And then the social responsibility piece, if it comes into the conversation at all, is it’s almost like a luxury to be able to talk about that because then we’re talking about like really Blueprints for those facilities. Or we’re really talking about getting out there and spreading that first acre of basalt or whatever it is. And that’s actually like a good problem to have. For better or for worse, in some of these earlier stage conversations, we’re just not there yet because we’re still dealing with a lot more kind of earlier existential questions.
Asa Kamer: You guys are taking things one step at a time, it sounds like.
Susan Su: I would say we’re taking things several steps at a time. But there are just so many steps. But that one is maybe in like the phase two of the steps.
Unknown speaker: Go ahead, Ben.
Ben Rubin: It’s great to hear Susan’s insight on it. And I definitely recognize that it’s a challenge and a pain point for the companies as they’re thinking about how to do everything at once, how to commercialize, how to deploy the technology. And I think when Asa was asking earlier, how did this come about? Part of the idea of an open source and having a free community training that any company can take is also just to try and help fill in some of the gaps for companies as they’re doing a fundraising round or having to think about so much at once.
What kinds of resources can we be putting out into the public domain to help companies think through this when, again, there’s so much moving forward on any given day for an early stage company?
Susan Su: I will say that if a training like this helps a company more easily put together a single slide or a single document in their data room that speaks to social impact, then that’s a win. Because if it helps them shortcut to figuring all of that out or it templatizes, and by the way, it’s going to change so much between whatever you’re ideating today and what ultimately gets implemented. And again, like I say, it’s literally it’s a luxury problem to even be able to be thinking about the on the ground implementation.
Many startups would die to be at that stage already. Right. And they’re not. But if you can sort of help them bring that into the conversation and even use it to educate investors through the fundraising process. And I think that’s a really huge win because then we start at least verbally having that discussion earlier, if not really sort of putting the pieces in place. And that’s already way more than we’re doing today.
Asa Kamer: Well, this is a good segue to my next question that I want to pose to both of you. So we have been covering on the show the abundance of different CDR and carbon offset standards and protocols that exist out there. So in a climate that is becoming increasingly scrutinizing of carbon offsets, How can companies continue to communicate the efficacy of their social responsibility to buyers? How can they cut through the noise?
Ben Rubin: Sure. I’m happy to take a first crack at it. I think it’s a great question and it’s obviously critically important to make sure that this question is answered for the continued growth of carbon removal. One thing that comes to mind for me, I think Bloomberg came out with an article this summer that I think says it succinctly. I like the headline of the article, which is that the three biggest letters in carbon removal are MRV. MRV is monitoring, reporting, and verification. And I think this is where MRV is so critical.
MRV can help answer these questions and help assuage concerns The carbon business council convened a working group on MRV and published an issue brief on this direct topic. I would answer it by saying that a lot of this question, which is fair to ask, if a company says that they’re removing a tonne of carbon from the atmosphere, how do we know that is working? The answer to that is in the MRV pathway. And there’s obviously a whole lot more to unpack within that. What are the different MRV protocols and how is this happening?
But I would surface MRV here as an answer to this question of how we build trust.
Susan Su: I mean, I agree with Ben. And of course, we know that MRV makes all the difference and it’s important to build out MRV. But I think the question that you asked, Asa, was around the just plurality of different standards and protocols, which actually affects the way that MRV itself happens. Because so much is still on the reporting and verification pieces. What are we reporting to? What are we verifying against? That’s where the protocols themselves really need to stand up to scrutiny. And I don’t think there’s, you know, like we’re still evolving this.
And I think there is totally room for new protocols that are taking in all the information that we’ve learned over the last 15 years. Through doing the first round of offsets, you know, the Gen 1 offsets, taking all that information and making something better. If I do think there’s a principal agent challenge with existing protocols that maybe already have quite a deep vested interest in what they’ve already issued to take in the information that even they themselves have learned and then produce an evolved outcome. If you know what I mean, it’s a little bit of a, almost like an innovator’s dilemma in a sense.
And that’s where sometimes we have to accept that these things are just going to change and there are going to be new players. And I think if investors, but also buyers and operators can get on board with the fundamental fact that there was a Gen 1 and we, that was really beneficial in many ways because it’s not like anybody had bad intentions, but Gen 1 was out there, generated a bunch of learning That learning now has to be incorporated into some kind of change, and that change may actually threaten the very structures that enable Gen 1 to exist.
And so I think to your specific question about how buyers can interact with this, I think buyers have to just understand that’s the reality and they have to be able to speak articulately with nuance to their stakeholders, whether those are consumers or whether they’re governments or whether they are other down the line investors about their understanding of that evolution. I don’t think there is a neat answer of like, oh, well, we’ll just do this magical marketing thing. And I do agree with Ben, but I don’t think that measurement alone is the answer because at the end of the day, we have to agree So Ben, before we move on, do you have any last words about the responsible deployment training that you’d like to say?
Ben Rubin: We also touch on MRV in the responsible deployment training and are talking also about just some of these big topics that resonate for communities at a local community level. People might ask the same question that an investor or a buyer of carbon removal might Excellent.
Asa Kamer: To lure more buyers, carbon removal tries to shed its Wild West reputation. That was the title of a recent Reuters article highlighting the growing interest in engineered carbon dioxide removal strategies among major corporations who are attempting to move beyond traditional offsetting methods. So looking at the tension between Gen 1 and Gen 2 carbon credits that Susan was just talking about. Despite skepticism and high costs, initiatives like Frontier are investing heavily, aiming to validate and scale CDR methods and potentially transforming them into a mandatory component of their corporate sustainability efforts. So Ben, considering the skepticism around CDR that this article looks at, how do you evaluate the progress of CDR?
The various efforts to make CDR a bigger part of corporate climate plants. There’s a lot going on. Are you seeing progress?
Ben Rubin: Yeah, it’s a good question. And I think Reuters was highlighting some of those questions that exist. The Reuters article, I believe, also had this too, which I think puts the carbon removal field on this interesting footing, which is this question of if someone is skeptical of it, if someone wants to know, can it scale up? How does it work? It’s also underpinned by what is this unequivocal scientific consensus from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that gigatonnes of carbon removal are needed. And so, and that’s in tandem with the important work of reducing emissions.
But if we take this scientific consensus and then we take the challenge, okay, we know that we have to get here. How do we do it? It does beg all of these questions of what blending of pathways are going to get us there? Is a tonne a tonne? Where does MRB fit into the mix? And so I think the Reuters article... Started highlighting all of these different questions that exist. I do see progress being made here on a number of fronts in both the public sector and the private sector. This summer, the Energy Department issued $15 million in funding to support national labs.
Evaluating a range of different carbon removal methods and looking into monitoring, reporting, and verification. And we once again saw this on display when the Energy Department recently put out the criteria for their landmark program on government procurement for tens of millions of dollars of carbon removal, a public sector approach to thinking about how are we... Measuring, diligencing, looking at carbon removal to ensure that these pathways have efficacy. And so we see the public sector stepping into an important role there. And we also see the private sector quickly working to answer these questions.
Registries in the space are working on thinking through this. Companies are coming together in coherent ways with a topic with Companies are coming together and uniting under coherent frameworks like the Reykjavik Protocol, which was released during Climate Week. And so I’m really encouraged to see this cross-pollination taking place and this collaboration taking place for people to foster cohesion and consensus and ultimately help guide any carbon removal buyer on their journey to be assuaged that carbon removal does have efficacy.
Asa Kamer: Great. So, Susan, this article highlighted some differing viewpoints about this issue. The CEO of the credit marketplace, Puro, says companies should buy CDR for their hard-to-bate emissions. And the head of the science-based Target Initiative emphasized the importance of corporations reducing their own emissions first. So... What do you make of that dialogue, that tension? Is there room for both? Or do you think that all corporate buyers need to pick one and that’s the right strategy?
Susan Su: I think people who are naturally oriented towards working out will say working out is the best way to get a ripped bod. And people who are naturally oriented towards calorie restriction will say that dieting is the best way to get there. In truth, you need both. And that’s what’s going on here in my very simplistic metaphorical analysis. Put a different way, if you think about a large company, you have within almost every single large corporate that’s out there, there’s going to be an R&D department. And then there’s going to be sort of the core operations, the core product.
If you ask the folks working in core product, none of those people would say that they are not also engaged in innovation because they are. And we’re always innovating our core product, even if we’re Google search, certainly for Google search these days. But that doesn’t mean that we can afford to not invest in R&D. It also doesn’t mean that we can only be R&D and not have a core product. So I think that these discussions are just I’m surprised, honestly, that we’re still having them because kind of to Ben’s point, you know, we know the science says that we have to do carbon removal.
The science also says that we have to do carbon abatement. So it’s sort of like, let’s move on. We know that we need to do both. And actually, it’s up to companies to be able to do both at the same time, just as they do innovation on core product. And innovation within, you know, far further out there R&D at the same time within the same organization. So I think about it a little bit like that. And I think it’s really important for the public, for the media to stop perpetuating this either or dichotomy, because I think it creates a simple story to put out there.
I don’t think that there are companies, if you look at some of the biggest buyers of carbon removal, they’re also working very, very hard on emissions reduction. Their actual buying behavior on carbon removal isn’t doing anything to limit their behavior on emissions reduction and vice versa. The ones that are active are always active in both because they recognize that climate crisis is now and the future and they’re looking to mitigate their risk. I honestly, now that I kind of am talking through this live, I do wonder, because it’s interesting, we’ve cited Reuters, Ben mentioned Bloomberg, there have been so many articles lately.
You know, now with Carbon Removal Newsroom, with the pods, like we almost don’t have enough time to cover everything that there is in mainstream news. Now, we’re not talking about like the fringe stuff that we all read here, but we’re talking about these mainstream outlets that are covering carbon removal and climate on a much more regular basis, which is awesome. But that also means that some of the nuance of what we are used to And there’s a lot that we don’t end up talking about each week.
Asa Kamer: So I absolutely hear what you’re saying. So Ben, going back to you, how do organizations like Frontier, who they talked about in this article, or your organization, Carbon Business Council, aim to communicate the Need to balance the high costs of current CDR methods with the need to attract investors and make it an attractive product compared to cheap offsets. How do you work to make it so that buyers understand, yes, it costs a lot, but it’s also something that we need to invest in.
Ben Rubin: Yeah, I think this is a really important question for ultimately how we scale up and grow the market. Susan made great points that I agree with about how emissions reductions and removals can move forward in tandem. I think there’s a relevant point here that builds on that. We’re going to talk about that in this context of cost, which is for the cost where it is today and bending the technology cost curve down as we see all technologies follow with the cost of solar, DNA sequencing, 3D printing, carbon removal is following along with that track.
But for that to get there, it does require this front end investment and that front end investment can ultimately lower the cost and get carbon removal to the quantities that the IPCC is saying that it has to get to in 2030. Risk delaying the investment today, treat it as this either or, going away from that paradigm that Susan was warning about, not falling into that trap. The investments today are what will help catalyze, scale, and grow the market. So it’s exciting when we see first movers taking that step. I think that there’s also...
And really promising developments and pathways that we’re seeing as more buyers come into the market, CDR, FYI, and their tracking, this was earlier in the summer, they found that the amount of removals had increased from 400% at this time this year to when we look back at levels from last year. And so it’s encouraging to see that buyers are having an appetite to purchase removals. I think one thing that’s helping to grow the market is if we think about blended portfolios, that it’s not only one carbon removal pathway, but if we are thinking about Putting in direct air capture and blending that with another form of CDR and another form of CDR, we can start to get at a blended tonne for carbon removal that might be more affordable for companies.
So a particular example of this purchasing behavior is the next-gen CDR facility. And when they announced the purchase of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon removal earlier this year, they also announced this target price point of $200 a tonne. No one project was that right, but they were able to get there by blending different projects together. And so I’m encouraged not only by the falling cost of carbon removal today, but also through these different financing mechanisms that are starting to emerge to help make it cost competitive. And this is before we start introducing in tax incentives and other benefits that help make it more and more affordable for buyers.
Asa Kamer: Excellent. Well, comparing to the solar market, they say a lot of the important advances in the growth of the solar industry were business model innovations and financing innovations. Maybe something we need to focus more on on the show. So, Susan, one more question for you. This is just sort of a fun speculation. I’m just going to lob it over to you. Do you think that the compliance markets for carbon removal will ever come or... Will we be relying on the voluntary markets for all of CDR’s growth from here to 2050 and beyond?
Susan Su: It’s like a salon question. I would love to hear a bunch of people’s opinions on this, but I’ll go ahead and throw mine out there and be publicly wrong for posterity. I think that we, I understand and I feel viscerally all of our issues I tend to think that the climate crisis itself will get very, very bad and will get so bad and will probably not take sufficient action until the point at which it gets very, bad that we’re going to reach a, um, Push comes to shove type of moment.
I think when that moment arrives, compliance markets will be a much more realistic outcome. And I personally think we need compliance markets. I think we need a price on carbon. I’ve been doing, just as a personal thing, I’ve been doing this writing exercise every morning when I wake up. And I’ll just kind of like let myself free write and free write. And it’s so crazy. And it’s like a living dream, all these things that come out. And the last few weeks I’ve been writing about the dynamics of the carbon removal market just to sort of help me sort through my own thinking on it.
And after about 20 pages of like just meandering babble, I arrived back at the beginning, which is we need a price on carbon. And that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to transform this whole entire thing. And I believe that every company that’s part of the Carbon Business Council or not yet part of it, every investor that’s somewhat involved in this space, deep in their heart of hearts, they have a little bit of hope that will happen. We have fear of the conditions that are going to lead us to that eventuality.
But we also have enough pessimism to understand that those conditions are very likely to come to pass and that we will arrive at that decision point sooner or later. We either figure this out and we clamp down on carbon or we are definitely going to hell in a handbasket. And I think that we’re going to choose the former. So that’s where I stand on it. But I could and am probably completely wrong. But hey, I’ll just throw it out there as one of those predictions that hopefully everybody forgets about in a few months.
Asa Kamer: Well, I’m glad I asked because those are some wonderful insights. And I mean, it’s so true. And I guess the conventional wisdom, at least in the U. S. , is that is the best economic way to address carbon emissions. And it’s just politically unfeasible. I mean, that’s what people in climate policy say. They’re just like, it just seems like such a reach. But I feel like we could... If we were really talking about the solution, every episode would end with, and obviously the way to do this is a price. We don’t even talk about it because it just feels so at this moment distant that it would somehow happen politically.
But you’re saying that things can change fast and that day might come. So thank you for that. So we’re going to move on to our next segment. So we’re going to talk a lot more about COP28 as the event approaches in about a month, specifically with the focus on the conversations there on carbon removal. The Carbon Business Council is part of a group called Carbon Removals at COP28, and they recently held a panel about carbon removals at COP28. So Ben, can you tell us a little bit about this event?
Ben Rubin: COP is coming up soon, and I do think carbon removal will be an important part of the conversation there. The Carbon Business Council, as you mentioned, is a partner with Carbon Removals at COP, which is helping to create, it’s a community platform where it will aggregate events. There’s going to be daily video briefings for people to learn more about the key takeaways of what’s playing out with carbon removals during COP. And there’ll be a whole lot for folks to be able to tune into, whether they are on the ground in Dubai or following the conversation remotely.
As we build towards this and as we build towards COP28 and prepare resources for folks, Earlier this week, we held a press briefing that we organized through Carbon Removals at COP, where we were starting to talk with reporters about here’s the key trends, here’s the key themes, and there’ll be more events coming down the pike. We have another event that we’re planning designed for the carbon removal community, a public event. That will be virtual on November 7th. So it’ll be another opportunity for people to tune in and take this deeper dive into what are the ways that carbon removal will play out at COP28 and starting to understand the particular role that everybody can play.
Again, whether they’re on the ground, want to contribute to conversations about carbon removal at COP or participating in this from afar.
Asa Kamer: Great. Well, maybe we’ll have to get an update from you after the event and you can tell us your takeaways for how it all went. Speaking of COP, Susan, what are you watching as this year’s COP approaches? What are you watching for? And is there anything that you think the CDR industry should be looking for as the events unfold?
Susan Su: I’m going to be watching The Activists. I think, you know, it’s impolite, but I’m not polite. It’s impolite to discuss the controversy around this year’s COP, but it’s certainly there. And I think it should be discussed and it’s definitely going to embroil the CDR industry. And so whether you are in CDR or whether you’re just a climate observer or you care at all about this, we should be paying attention to All of the challenges of hosting COP in a massive fossil fuel economy headed up by a leader in the fossil fuel economy who is reticent to discuss a complete phase out of fossil fuels.
We were just talking earlier about how there’s still this tension between You know, the R&D around carbon removal and the continued innovation around emissions reduction. That debate is not going to be served by the way this year’s COP is shaping up and kind of who the actors are. So if I were part of the CDR industry, or I guess I am, I would be Thinking very carefully about that, trying to navigate that and trying to be, I think, humble, but also get ready to take a position. So I think we should just be looking a little bit at what happens on the activist front, what sort of, I guess, arguments and points of discussion get raised there.
And we should be ready to have some More, I guess, unfriendly or impolite conversations because that’s what’s necessary to get to some solutions.
Asa Kamer: Great. So Ben, another important development in international governance related to carbon removal is the continued development of Article 6. 4 of the Paris Agreement, which regulates the international carbon market. We’ve been talking about it a lot over the past few months. Can you tell us about how that process has been developing and what do you think what developments have been important to the member companies of CBC?
Ben Rubin: Yeah, this process has been moving forward. It was earlier this year, it was in May, an early draft of the document came out from the 6. 4 supervisory body and had some language about carbon removal that We had more than 100 carbon removal experts sign it with a series of points about the benefits of carbon removal, about the different ways that carbon removal can fit in. And that, I think, helped open a meaningful and important dialogue with the 6. 4 supervisory body and the carbon removal community to try and chart through what are the best intersections between carbon removal and the international carbon market.
Generally, conversations have been progressing in a positive way, and we’re expecting to see an updated draft from the 6. 4 supervisory body that will come out ahead of COP28. That could come out any week now and generally encouraged. Susan was talking about predictions. And so looking forward to see that updated text. And 6. 4 is important because we are talking about global carbon markets here. And where is there? How do we find cohesion in international standards? So making sure that carbon removal has the right footing within that framework will be important for the continued growth of the industry.
Asa Kamer: Great. I have another question for you, Ben. It’s actually our last question today. So this is a little outside of the normal scope of the business panel, but since it’s sort of breaking news, I just wanted to ask you about it. We recently had Sebastian Manhart on the show, and he was telling us quite at length about the EU’s CDR certification framework that’s being developed. There was a major vote on that policy, I guess, yesterday or last week. Can you give us an update on what happened and what your takeaway was of the results of that vote?
Ben Rubin: Yes. So the vote that took place voted on the text on the carbon removal certification framework as it had been crafted. So Sebastian was likely speaking about some of the challenges of the draft text and the opportunities to try and make that more tech neutral. The text as it’s currently written does not take this larger and more tech neutral approach. And so it’s not a final done deal. There’s more votes, there’s more meandering, there’s an implementation phase. And so there’s still an opportunity, I think, for increased engagement here. It’s not necessarily over until it’s over.
But it is currently looking like the carbon removal certification framework might not be inclusive of multiple carbon removal pathways. This, I think, speaks to this. How can we create a level playing field so that multiple forms of carbon removal can scale up? The Carbon Business Council is a tech neutral organization. We ultimately think that the best forms of innovation and the best pathway to reach gigatonne scale will be from encouraging innovation. And we see tech neutrality as a really important way to reach that innovation. So I think that it’s definitely worth folks keeping a close eye on the carbon removal certification framework as the conversations on that progress, but then also keeping an eye on the suite of other policies as they continue to move forward in the U.
S. , as they continue to move forward in Canada and Australia. So I think there’s certainly some challenges that we should be focusing and paying attention to related to this certification framework in the EU, but also multiple opportunities ahead.
Asa Kamer: Well, listen, with that, we’re going to wrap up the show. Ben, Susan, thank you so much for joining us. And until next time, thanks for listening.
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