This week we're joined by two experts in the evolving world of CDR policy in Europe. Eli Mitchell-Larson from Carbon Gap and Lee Beck from the Clean Air Task Force.
The E.U. is working on a certification standard for CDR to complement its existing climate plan. When completed, it will likely represent the largest jurisdiction with a comprehensive policy plan to scale up carbon removal.
Last week the U.K. government sought public input on its own CDR effort. This particular policy effort aims to find business models that will help CDR scale by the end of this decade.
The text of the release finds that a significant barrier to scaling up CDR is “the absence of a predictable revenue stream for negative emissions.” Notably, it also says that “the cost of deploying these techs is borne by polluting sectors to compensate for their remaining emissions.”
Radhika, Eli, and Lee talk about how important these policies could turn out to be, what timeline they are on, and what their organizations are doing to support carbon removal in Europe.
Full Transcript
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the July 14th episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom. Today, we’re going to be focusing on policy, specifically European policy, which we have been very negligent on, so I’m excited to get started on this topic. Joining me today is Eli Mitchell Larson. He is Launch Director at Carbon Graph. And then I also have Leigh Beck. She’s the Senior Director for Europe on the Clean Air Task Force. Hello, Leigh.
Lee Beck: Hi, thank you so much for having me today.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And then, as always, this is Radhika Moolgavkar, I am the head of supply and methodology at NORI. So, as I mentioned at the beginning, we are going to today talk about the EU and what’s going on. And I think one of the biggest things that the EU is working on is this removal certification mechanism. And so they are working on a certification standard for carbon dioxide removal. To complement its existing climate plan. And when it’s completed, it will likely represent the largest jurisdiction with a comprehensive policy plan to scale up carbon removal.
Lee, I’d like to start with you to just maybe give us a broad overview of the program and what its goals and how the UU is trying to achieve its goals.
Lee Beck: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for this question. Maybe I can quickly introduce the Clean Air Task Force as well. We’re a climate NGO who is working on a variety of clean energy and climate technologies. Right now, we were founded 25 years ago in the United States, but have since expanded to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Our work is really driven by optionality. That means each country or region will likely require a different technology portfolio of options to decarbonize and we want to ensure that we’re commercializing all options to really ensure that we have all technologies available preventing path dependency.
And for us, of course, Carbon dioxide removal is one piece in the puzzle that can help us potentially mitigate for those sectors that have no other alternatives, such as aviation or limited other alternatives, as well as, of course, draw down CO2 from the air that’s already in the atmosphere. And why we’re really excited about the CDR certification mechanism in Europe is it’s a pioneering effort to set a gold standard on how to measure CDR or actual carbon removal. And from our perspective, we’re really excited because this is obviously the groundwork, the pioneering groundwork that needs to be done to ensure that we can actually Measure and deliver real and permanent carbon dioxide removal.
So from our perspective, there’s a lot of hype right now. There’s a lot of conversations around these technologies, but not all carbon dioxide removal methods, as we’ll probably explore in this conversation, are created equal. So we need to make sure that we have strong Regulatory framework to build trust in these technologies and methods and also create a pathway to incentivize them so we can build a deployment policy around them. So I’ll stop here. I’m sure Eli has many thoughts about this as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, Eli, one, please introduce your organization, let our audience members know what Carbon Gap does, but also Yeah, let’s get into a little bit of the scope of the scheme and kind of the policy issues that the EU governments have to resolve before the rules take effect. I think on this side of the pond, maybe we have a little bit of a feeling that the EU is very bureaucratic, takes a long time to move forward. So curious about how things are moving.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Thank you, Radhika. So, and thank you for having me. I’m Eli Mitchell Larson. I’m the Launch Director at Carbon Gap. And we are a new NGO. We were launched at COP26, just focused on driving European leadership on carbon removal. So we try to build coalitions and build We have an understanding of the full breadth of carbon removal solutions or methods across all of the different capture methods and storage methods. And we also work to conduct really targeted policy advocacy to try to drive European leadership and European support for carbon removal.
And yeah, diving right in. I mean, I think what your listeners on your side of the pond will find really fascinating is that in the European policymaking apparatus, they really do things right in the sense that they’re starting from the baseline. The carbon removal certification mechanism, forgive us if we start to say CRCM, And get a bit rapid fire here, is it’s the foundation on which all other pillars of European climate policy, like, for example, the carbon hoarder adjustment mechanism, the EU ETS, advertising regulation, all of these other elements of European regulation will reference the carbon removal certification mechanism.
They will ask the question, hey, do you need to measure how much carbon was removed and stored? See the CRCM. So it’s hard to overstate the importance of this. And I think in terms of the scope, you asked about the scope. I mean, we had some issues in the beginning, I think, because we looked at the large consultations that were conducted, and they included things like carbon capture and storage, which, of course, is usually not a CCD. There’s that kind of Venn diagram of overlap. But overall, the scope is pretty good.
It’s basically any method for taking CO2 out of the air or upper ocean and storing that CO2. How do you measure that? And I think there are still some open questions about how do you Break down that big universe of carbon removal methods into buckets that are sort of logical for building a certification mechanism, because this is where the rubber meets the road. This is really taking all of the learnings and science and measurement and reporting and verification work that the academic community has done and turning it into something real.
So there are some very significant politically relevant issues that the that Brussels, and eventually the Member States, when they hopefully adopt this regulation, this directive will have to resolve, and you know I’ll just name one because Of course, we are at this Nori podcast, which is great, but there’s many others that Lee can bring up and we can bring up later. But I think the real implication is European land management, and particularly with the kind of, frankly, the need to help Basically, ensure a living wage for rural livelihoods. That’s why the common agricultural policy exists.
And so there is an imperative to basically support European agriculture, not least because of the security concerns that we’re seeing popping up over the past few years. And so it’s critical that happens. It’s also critical that to the degree that those incentives are being tied to how much carbon is being absorbed and stored in the soils, that’s done in a legitimate way. And we have some really exciting ideas that we’ve been putting to the commission. And we’ll get into it later, but we’ve actually been really pleased to partner with the Clean Air Task Force and their Brussels team on some convenings that we’ve been holding in Brussels to really talk to the commission, try to act as a sounding board and try to put forward some real constructive proposals to make sure that this is the premier and sort of first of a kind comprehensive carbon removal certification mechanism in the world.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, I could go so many different ways with all that great information. But I think my first question for you both, and I’ll start with you and move over to you, Eli. I’ll start with you, Lee, and then I’ll move over to you, Eli, is do you get any pushback about carbon removal as a policy because of the moral hazard question? I tend to ask a lot of my guests about it, but I’m curious within the EU if you hear it. We shouldn’t be focused on carbon removal at all right now because we really should be 100% focused on emission reduction, which we haven’t yet figured out at a policy level.
Lee, your thoughts, and then Eli, your thoughts.
Lee Beck: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there is certainly... Um, this notion that, you know, it’s not a silver bullet. We can’t sell it as that, especially, um, CATF focuses both on the land use and the technological side, though I’m more, uh, an expert on the technological side. It’s not been demonstrated at the megatonne or giga megatonne scale, let alone gigatonne scale that we need. But I think from our perspective, The clock is ticking to address the climate crisis. And from our perspective, climate is also an infrastructure problem. So we need to understand today what the technologies and what the infrastructure is that we need to achieve a climate neutral Europe.
And then we need to plan for a rollout. So while, of course, it will always be cheaper and always be more important to deliver mitigation through comprehensive asset transformation, Across the sectors, we also need to plan for gigatonne carbon removal in the European Union. And so looking at historical scaling timelines of innovative technologies that have taken decades, we really need to lay that groundwork today. And so taking it back to the certification mechanism, this is really the first step, as Eli said, right? We’re laying the baseline, we’re setting the expectations.
And so first of all, We are also with the EU engaging in this conversation, engaging in this delivering this regulatory framework shows there is political recognition that we will need these solutions, but there’s also political recognition that we need to create pathways and create regulatory frameworks to build trust, as I said. And so what we’re hoping will come out of this Certification mechanism is a framework that ensures that carbon removals are real, that they’re measurable, that there are additional to mitigation, that they’re permanent and do not result in leakage and also avoid double counting.
And from these principles, this would really show Hopefully, not only create the pathway for incentivizing technologies, a suit of technologies, recognizing that not all of them are equal, but also help us break through the dichotomy or the conventional fault lines between natural and technological CVR methods, but also help us to guide the private sector and the voluntary market initiatives, which I think many NGOs, including CATF, Regards as skepticals or with a grain of salt and really ensure that we’re also through rigorous regulatory mechanisms building trust in these technologies and break through this idea that we’re starting too soon because we need to do mitigation first.
The clock’s ticking, we need to tackle the climate crisis and we need to keep an open mind for innovation.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Eli?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Amazing. I couldn’t have said it better myself. I think I don’t want to dwell too much on the moral hazard piece. I think it comes up a lot. I think at Carbon Gap we recognize that issue. We would say the greater moral hazard would be not to develop these different methods that we’re clearly going to need. I often say, you know, when did the clock start? Did it start at the 1992 Earth Summit? Did it start at the 2015 Paris Agreement? Or did it start today? Because even if we follow a net zero trajectory, we stop dangerous climate change, all that carbon we’re putting up from 2022 So I think it’s unequivocal that we’ll want to have these methods available.
It’s also true that we need to make sure they don’t undermine that fast, often cheaper, more efficient climate action that Lee was discussing with emission reductions. I think in the European Union, Or specifically, there’s a lot of excitement, certainly in the circular carbon economy. I hesitate to use that term because I think it’s frankly been kind of co-opted by some slightly unsavory actors, but the principle is great. It’s that we can put carbon into the built-in So I think as Lee was alluding to these kind of fault lines where different groups have different preferences about what methods they like and what methods they don’t.
And I think there’s some that are really gaining that support. And so the other thing I would add about this kind of panoply of different carbon removal methods, they’re also different. And as Lee said, they have strengths and weaknesses. What I think is important to recognize is just as they have different characteristics around their durability, the longevity of storage, how easy it is to constrain things like indirect carbon leakage, which is so tough in the land sector, they also have different levels of readiness. And I don’t just mean that in the sort of technology and readiness level sense about how mature is a different type of direct air capture.
I mean it in terms of our level of certainty that a carbon benefit has been delivered. And this is something that I think will kind of let everyone breathe out a sigh of sort of relief, I hope, in just saying, you know, we don’t have to fight tooth and nail to make sure that people hear about our favorite method and our favorite solution. And often you see this happen with the DAC folks saying one thing and the reforestation folks saying another. There are some qualities of stored carbon that we can directly measure and observe.
And that’s what durability means. It’s the risk of reversal on an annual basis. And it’s a physical quality, just like whether my water bottle is red or green. I can also measure durability of stored carbon. And we can predict that reversal risk. We can measure it in the lab. We can use historical data. And once we’re able to make those comparisons, we can actually use legal and financial mechanisms to try to ensure permanence, even for those riskier types of storage. So I think what’s so exciting about the CRCM, the Carbon Removal Certification Mechanism, is it creates a platform.
If the governance is done right, we’ll be able to kind of onboard these different methodologies for different methods as they’re ready. So maybe offshore kelp isn’t quite ready for a full-blown certification methodology that can be used inside of the EU ETS, for example, but it will be ready, we hope, and it needs certain things. So what we really pushed for in our consultation response, what we’ve been advocating for the Commission is that we really have this ability to onboard different carbon removal methods, even if they’re at different stages.
Of being able to demonstrate that they’ve delivered a carbon benefit. If they’re not, if there’s questions about soil carbon measurement, et cetera, well, then let’s put the resources in to close those gaps and understanding. And that’s exactly what a body like the European Commission or the entity we hope will be created by the CRCM. It might sit within the same entity that manages the EU ETS. Maybe it’ll be a new entity. We’re still working through that. But whatever entity it is, that’s going to be the entity that can hopefully direct research funds as well to help shore up The ability to develop methodologies for the kind of new carbon removal methods, because, and I’ll end with this, there’s a bunch of carbon removal methods we haven’t even thought of yet.
You know, there’s, there’s not just one type of DAC, there’s four, and there’s probably going to be four more in the next 10 years. We can’t predict what the kind of winners, so to speak, or what the leading carbon removal methods will be. That’s why we need to support all of them. We need to find a place for all of them while ensuring that integrity and making sure that nobody’s making claims that are not legitimate on the backs of that removal.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Lee, I think you have something you want to add?
Lee Beck: Yeah, absolutely. I just want to home in on one point. That Eli and I both have mentioned that not all carbon removal methods are created equal and have different durability or different And I think what we are really interested in looking at is breaking down, as I said, the dichotomy of nature versus technology and look at shifting portfolios. So what can we do today? We can already incentivize carbon removal methods, but we have to recognize their limitations. And this is how we have to measure them. And then also incentivize them to really ensure that we have a shifting portfolio of different carbon removal methods that are helping us deliver on climate targets, but without overstating their ability to durably remove carbon and also without, of course, making them subject to greenwashing criticisms.
So I think there is really a responsibility from NGOs like Carbon Gap and Cleaner Task Force and Bologna and others in Europe to really show what a responsible carbon, responsible but innovation forward carbon dioxide removal portfolio looks like.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So you both, I think, mentioned really important like technical pieces to carbon dioxide removal, the durability, the technological readiness, the permanence. I’m curious what I didn’t hear a lot of conversation around and whether it’s even maybe applicable is like the social acceptability of the carbon removal. Eli talked about land management. So when you do these things, bringing farmers along, feeling like they’re part of the process, ocean-based, obviously there’s a lot of passion around oceans. So how are your organizations approaching that social piece of the question and how is the EU Commission approaching that piece?
Eli, I’ll start with you on that.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Such an important point, Radhika. And I think we’d point to some of the amazing work by thinkers like Emily Cox, who have really delved into this. Because I think our perspective at Carbon Gap is, first and foremost, engage everyone. So we want to talk to youth groups. We want to talk to some of the environmental groups that are not as thrilled about some of these solutions and have really legitimate concerns. We want to be maximally inclusive in terms of hearing what those concerns are. I think we also feel really strongly that the best way to actually measure public acceptance is to try building this stuff.
So when you’ve got a tangible project somebody can look at, that changes everything. And so this isn’t from the commission or from Brussels, but we’re really excited about this project that we’re on the advisory board for in Switzerland. Where the Swiss government has basically funded this sort of end-to-end demonstration where they’ll capture carbon from waste treatment, wastewater treatment. So it’s coming from human waste, right? So it’s biogenic. And, you know, bottle it up in isotainers, drive it to the border, train it to Rotterdam Bring it on a boat to Iceland and store it there.
And I think, you know, at a modest scale, but with public funding so that all the costs have to be revealed, right? Like it’s one thing to have Climeworks or one of these companies do this. If it’s a government funded project, the whole world gets to benefit from the knowledge that’s delivered. And I think if we can kind of show these examples of CO2 caravans, we can really demystify what this looks like. And I think, you know, similar things for some of the regenerative farming practices. I had a really interesting...
Experience yesterday, actually, meeting with some farmers in the UK who are really advanced on the kind of regenerative ag side, and they were being almost pitted against a group of precision fermentation advocates. So people that believe in this whole thing about, you know, building proteins from bacteria, like sort of precision manufacturing food components. And it was really what was so amazing was, although there was a lot of kind of tension with These kind of proactive farmers were saying, hey, listen, if I can have a distributed small targeted fermentation plant on my farm and I can actually make food that way, like I’d consider it like, is it safe?
Can I add flavor and like brand it in my own way and generate a premium? Like they were curious. So I think, you know, people are more open than we think, but they have to be approached with respect. They have to be able to see, touch and feel the method that’s being used. And a lot of care has to be taken to protect against the sort of downside risk. And that’s where I think at the European level, at the Brussels level, the CRCM, if it’s, I would say that’s something that we, Lee, you know, Clean Air Task Force, Carbon Gap, Bologna, Negative Emissions Platform, all of us, we probably need to do more of is really Make sure, hold the commission to task and eventually the parliament to make sure that the governance and the consultation that this CRCM will have will include those voices, particularly of folks, you know, and thinkers and Scientists and really anybody outside of Europe where a lot of these projects might get deployed.
That’s a classic failure where if the MRV and the methodologies are developed in Europe for Europe, but the projects are built elsewhere, that’s a massive red flag. So maximum inclusivity on all of those different axes.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Lee, I want to pivot to just your organization a little bit. I know you said the Clean Air Task Force submitted a public comment. What kind of was the emphasis of your submission and what do you think some of the ways different recommendations might differ?
Lee Beck: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to go over this and also incorporate some of my thoughts on the previous questions. So I think in general, our recommendation, obviously, we’re in line with what I already said, creating trust, that there’s a lot of opportunity and that the EU as a climate superpower should really aim to set this global gold standard so other countries can copy it. And for this, I mean, the principles that should be guiding such a certification, as I said, it has to be real, measurable, permanent, and there’s an additionality of removals in addition to those that are already required by existing policies and regulations, avoidance of leakage, avoidance of double counting.
And we included also a piece that is about sustainability so that the negative externalities that can potentially stem from social or environmental implications of CDR deployment are addressed through strict regulation that we ensure that the deployment of CDR does not result in any net harm to the environment or people. But we also see that this CDR certification mechanism might be evolving as there’s additional scientific evidence, technologies are scaled. And so what we’re really also recommending is that the certification mechanism not only establishes clear institutional roles to oversee and implement the framework, That ensures, of course, robust governance and compliance, but also that there’s advisory boards at the EU level, which ensure, on the one hand, the harmony across the block and high standards, but also could have different forms.
So there could be a scientific advisory board to achieve excellence with regards to scientific evidence and rigor. There could be an advisory board consisting of market participants who are really implementing technologies or Working at voluntary carbon markets, but also the civil society stakeholders really have to have their perspective in this conversation. Of course, the EU is also right now as part of the sustainable carbon cycles communication, which was released just before Christmas last year, looking to calling on experts to really form an institutional role of experts and then We’re also, of course, hoping that the EU can further clarify how the certification mechanism will potentially feed into volunteer and compliance markets and how this is supposed to evolve over the next decade.
So you can see like this is what we’ve seen so far from European Commission is an initial start. And there’s a lot more questions that will need to be addressed. And so we’ve thought through this. But we’re also, I think, at Clean Air Task Force, having worked through multiple iterations of policies In multiple countries, we are seeing that, you know, this is embarking on this climate mitigation and carbon removal journey is something that we’ve never done before. So we need policy to evolve, to become stricter, to become more rigorous, and to also be able to be flexible to take into account and be changed in case it isn’t working.
And I think the Europeans are already on a very good path towards when we’re looking how solar was commercialized in Germany with new policy iterations every two years. So there’s a very promising environment here. But from our perspective, we’re really looking at this as a pioneering effort that we need to make sure we have as many experts and perspectives at the table as possible. But really, the outcome must be to deliver the ideal impact for climate in society.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thanks, Lee. That was just a small, small little bit of the stuff this policy has to accomplish. So I want to pivot now to the UK, which is the non-EU part of this conversation today, and really learn more about what they’re doing. Because as I understand it, last week, the UK government sought public input on its own carbon dioxide removal effort. And this policy effort aims to find business models that will help CDR scale by the end of this decade. I have to say, from my very, I know, American perspective, I don’t hear a lot about European and UK CDR startups.
I hear a lot about American startups, so I’m curious about this. The text of the release finds that the significant barrier to scaling up CDR is the absence of a predictable revenue stream for negative emissions. Notably, it also says that the cost of deploying these texts is borne by polluting sectors to compensate for their remaining emissions. So Eli, what do you think about like more of a business model focus versus kind of a policy focus that the UK is taking? Does this mean that they’re confident that the technical innovation is going to happen in their country kind of on their own or what are they thinking?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: So first of all, shout out to all of the UK carbon removal providers like Future Forest. I’m blanking on their new name. Is it Undo? Origin Power. There’s a whole host of them. And I think you’re absolutely right. We should have some more friendly transatlantic rivalry. And there’s some great accelerators that are funded by Climate Kick and Switzerland. So there’s a lot of activity in Europe. And we’re hoping at Carbon Gap to keep pushing for policy and financial support to keep that innovation wave cresting. The UK history with removals is fascinating, and it’s really, I think, quite impressive the way they’ve approached it.
So, you know, the UK was the first country with a Climate Change Act in 2005 to really actually tie their own hands and mandate a trajectory towards net zero with this body, the Committee on Climate Change, that has enormous powers to make recommendations of successive carbon budgets. And so... I think they came to the realization that they would need really lots of removals sooner than other countries. I mean, look at the goal by 2030. I think the UK has said they want to be removing 5 million tonnes per year of high durability carbon removal with high durability carbon removal.
And the European Union has sort of soft promised the exact same amount in the sustainable carbon cycles communication, but that’s not enshrined anywhere yet. So I think the UK has quite a bit of ambition. And I think the business models language might be a little bit confusing. It definitely was for me at first. What they really mean is, no, they’re not counting on those costs to come down. They know. That the only way to make those costs come down is to do what Lee was alluding to with the, you know, German Energiewende and the power of deployment incentives, right?
The power of government to provide an incentive that has three things, a fixed price or a very, you know, narrowly constrained price, a long contract, and an off taker that you can trust. If a deployment incentive has those three things, it can work and it can do what, you know, Greg Nemet so beautifully has shown in his How Solar Got Cheap website and book. It can bring the cost of energy innovation and technologies way, way down. And so this consultation from the UK government is asking the question, logistically speaking, we would like to provide a deployment incentive.
We would like to pay you upon delivery of high durability carbon removal. And how should we do that? Should it be a backstop price? Should it be a kind of fixed contract for difference? There’s all kinds of details and economists are gonna have a field day analyzing which is gonna be the most efficient. And we’re still working on our own conservation response, but it’s good news. It means the UK understands that it’s initial 100 million pounds that it provided for kind of carbon removal’s innovation. Which is a really powerful program that’s just kind of midstream right now.
They know that’s not enough. They have to provide an incentive to some of the more mature CDR methods so that the cost can come down with that deployment incentive over time. And so we are very excited about this consultation. We’re thrilled that Bayes has structured it the way they have. And so we’ll be very keenly following it to its conclusion and beyond.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Lee, most of our listeners are US-based and so they’re kind of very familiar with the US government efforts to support CDR, none of which have tied the cost of deployment to industry. Is this kind of as notable as it seems and how important is it for a government to ensure that polluters bear the cost of CDR?
Lee Beck: Yeah, absolutely. I think from our perspective, There is often this notion with decarbonization that polluters have to bear the cost, which is certainly right through regulation, through compliance markets. However, what we’re seeing is that in the absence of innovative technologies, polluters never had This opportunity or this ability to actually or to be forced to deploy these technologies, right? So the EU ETS is a good example where certain high emitting industries and power plants receive a certain amount of free allocations of emissions certificates. And in the US, you know, we have to admit there’s not no comprehensive climate policy, right?
So right now we’re seeing governments play a little bit of this government and companies play this chicken and Kind of this game of chicken where governments are not really sure how to enact more stringent climate policy And companies are saying, well, without technologies, we can’t really decarbonize, but also not going the extra mile to show steel in the ground and that they can actually implement these technologies, right? So for us, there is, at Cleaner Task Force, there’s really a clear distinction we need to make between innovation incentives, commercializing technologies, as Eli already explained, and comprehensive climate policy.
And the theory of change goes, which has also already been demonstrated, for example, power plant regulation in the past, is that if we can deliver or lower the cost of these technologies, then it will become more easily for governments to regulate, to require the investment in these technologies, to require the deployment, but also it will make Create a bigger stakeholder base around these technologies because all of a sudden they’re commercialized, they’re available, they can’t be deployed, right? And so from our perspective, it’s really important right now that we invest in innovation that has global gains.
We only have to commercialize these technologies once. If we can do it between the US and Europe, they will be available at lower cost to everyone else across the globe. But then really quickly, we need to come in, especially in the United States, with much more stringent climate policy, which of course is in the current political environment uncertain. But I think what distinguishes the private sector in Europe and the US is in the US, it seems like the private sector is playing for time. As in, there are a few first movers that are taking the incentive that are available today.
For them today to decarbonize to transform their assets or to deploy but make draw plans at least to deploy large scale carbon removal. While others are seeing calculating looking at the political environment and calculate maybe it won’t be in the next, you know, four years or six years or eight years that will get. At comprehensive climate policy, but it will come. And so I think there’s a little bit of a slower uptake. However, in Europe with very clear roadmap towards the climate neutral Europe and the UK is the same. He’s a very clear roadmap.
The UK has has reduced emissions by a larger share than any other advanced economy. I think companies are much more incentivized to Think more holistically how they can keep their social license to operate and also continue to survive in a climate constraint in the climate aligned marketplace. And so this is, I think the key differences between the US and Europe and certainly at some point we will have to require That polluters will have to pay. And there’s also, you know, between Eli and myself, there are conversations with others around the carbon take back obligations.
Again, this requires new policy events, new climate policy instruments, which no one has pioneered before.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Lee was alluding to a little bit of the gridlock in the US political system, which we’re all very familiar with. But Eli, I’m kind of curious, the UK is also in the midst of some transitions, if you will, and their government is definitely going through some changes, along with the broader EU kind of political scene with obviously the war in Ukraine. How do you imagine these political winds will impact CDR development if it will at all? Maybe it’s so enshrined it won’t matter.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Well, yeah, I challenge listeners to imagine a political environment in which all of the major parties are supportive of climate action. It’s almost impossible to imagine, right? But that is the case in the UK. And I think, I mean, that’s a bit glib. There’s certainly big differences. And I think You know, what’s been so amazing in the UK since the early 2000s when the Climate Change Act campaign was really kicking off is this has not been a particularly politicized issue, right, in the UK. That, unfortunately, there might be some intimations that’s changing.
Some of the contenders in the kind of horse race at the moment for the prime minister role have expressed kind of anti net zero views in the past. So I think, you know, I don’t want to speculate on politics. I want to sort of focus on the levers that we have. The UK did something really powerful by creating the Committee on Climate Change, this independent body with enormous power, really, to set and recommend. I always remember my first, one of my first weeks at Oxford, I went to a talk by Lord Deben, who’s the chair of the Committee on Climate Change.
I knew nothing about this. And I asked a question at the end, which was, you know, as an American, how can How does a committee tie the hands of MPs and the voting public? How is that constitutional? And I was immediately reminded that the UK doesn’t have a constitution. So it’s a really fascinating setup where this committee makes recommendations and the government then needs to follow them and can be held accountable if it doesn’t. So I think regardless of who’s in power, like Lee was saying with the EU, I mean, the EU does an amazing job of providing that clarity Of a roadmap so industry can start to shift because they know what’s coming.
The UK in a similar way. So I think there’s some stability across, you know, with the next election coming, if there is a change in the party in power. Regardless, some of these, you know, levers are already here. So we want to focus on the existing commitments that have been made, the clear ambition to lead on carbon removal in the UK. And make sure that momentum is kept up. And to your point earlier about social acceptability and engagement, a lot of work is still needed in the UK, particularly given that this was the hotbed of a lot of amazing activity from Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain and Fridays for Future, really radical climate action that made a massive difference.
Everything from people gluing themselves to the wall of the Department of Responsible for Climate to holding up the IPCC 1. 5 report and reading it out loud. This really changed the conversation. It really shifted the Overton window. Those groups definitely need to be consulted. They need to be involved and engaged in the conversation around removal. They haven’t been as much to date. That’s, I think, a failing of the other parts of the environmental movement that are pushing for these solutions. So we need to make sure that they’re part of the conversation regardless, and especially as the political situation changes.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, Eli, I’m going to let you take us out because I know that you wanted to talk about a few other of the UK GGR policy developments. So can you very briefly walk us through some of the ones that you felt like highlighting for our audience?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Well, I’ll go quick because we actually have an event next week in partnership with the Open Air Collective just on UK greenhouse gas removal policies. So we’ll be doing a little overview then. But the one point I wanted to make was on this business models consultation. So this is about the government asking the public How do you want us to dole out these incentives for carbon removal? And I was maybe being very positive about how they’ve structured it earlier. I just want to make clear that we haven’t won the key battle yet.
And to me, that battle, I’m curious what Lee thinks about this. You know, it’s important to us that the policy incentives, the deployment incentives that government puts out focus on the outcome that’s being delivered. So not any specific carbon removal method, but the outcome, which is taking CO2 from the air or upper ocean, storing it in reservoirs where the reversal risk is vanishingly low. So high durability, very, very permanent removals. That’s for this consultation. Of course, on the land sector side, there’s other policy movements involved. In play that we can touch on, but that’s not a done deal yet.
So we’re really calling for and trying to make sure that the result of this policy is a solution. It’s a policy that can incentivize lots of different forms of carbon removal methods that can actually deliver the same thing, which is this high durability removal. There is a particular focus and interest in the UK on leading on bioenergy, which you might think is a bit funny because the UK is the world’s number two timber importer. You can guess why. There’s not a lot of biomass here. Most of it vanished long ago.
And so it doesn’t really make sense. I think Sweden with their reverse auction for BioCCS, that’s a really amazing play. They’ve got vast forests working for us that they can rely on. In the UK, we really hope that we aren’t pushing specific solutions because of existing Elements that have already been set in motion. I won’t speak specifically to them. So I think if we can make sure that we are defining what the outcome we want to deliver is, giving a fair price for that outcome, and then let the sector compete to come up with all kinds of creative ways for removing and storing carbon that can deliver that same outcome to the atmosphere.
Lee Beck: Yeah, I mean, from our perspective, I think we agree with everything that Eli just said. I think in general, the one piece that I would take away from this conversation is since we covered a little bit of the US, what the UK is doing is Europe is that I already said we only need to commercialize the technologies once, but there’s also a lot to learn. In terms of policy mechanisms and what is working, what is not working, how can we tweak? Of course there’s intricacies that are very unique to each country.
In the US it’s the tax code, in other places it’s more of a subsidy, but I think the general notion of how this could be working Can be similar across different countries. So one thing that we’d like to see more engagement is as we’re looking at multinational companies looking to deploy technologies in multiple countries, but also NGOs engaging as a robust exchange, as Eli was saying, with Open Air Collective and Carbon Gap, CATF with Carbon Gap and Bologna and other Andrew is really at the forefront of this issue. Carbon 180 is another example in the United States.
It’s really having a lot of exchanges on how we can deliver the best policy because it can save us a lot of time and can help policymakers inform. And so this is really one thing that we’re hoping we can lay the groundwork for this moving forward at the Clean Energy Ministerial Mission Innovation Meeting or what’s also now called the Global Clean Energy Action Forum in September, all the way to the roadmap of COP 27 and COP 28, where innovation and innovative solutions will certainly be on top of the agenda. So I think closing out with this, we really need to ensure that we’re saving time and taking the best and the most working policy solutions and proliferate them globally.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, with that, I thank you both. Before we end the show, we always like to do a little bit of good news. And so today, we obviously are a carbon removal show, but we all also know emission reduction is the number one priority. And so in April, the U. S. hit a record 28% in renewable energy. And that is amazing news for this country. We are seeing that the renewable energy from wind, solar, and hydroelectric dams has risen from 8. 6% in April of 2021 to 28% in 2022 so we’re making progress costs are coming down and that’s all good news for our but we’re all working on, which is to mitigate and stop climate change with that.
Eli, Lee, thank you both so much for joining the program. I am really looking forward to seeing where your NGOs and this policy moves forward in both the UK and EU. So thank you both.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Thank you, Radhika.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And for all of our listeners, we look forward to chatting with you in the future. Thanks so much for listening.
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