Following 2015’s UN Paris Agreement, each signatory country submitted a strategy indicating how they intend to decarbonize their economy. While much of the work comes from cutting emissions, plans can also include a ‘residual emissions’ category- that’s where carbon removal comes in.
But recent research from our panelist Holly Buck and her colleagues found no standard definition of residual emissions.
Residual emissions are significant; most come from agriculture, industry, and mobility. Crucially, land-use sinks won’t offset all residual emissions by 2050- meaning many countries hope new CDR technologies are reliable.
For the world to meet climate goals, countries must achieve the ambitions set out in their plans. If those plans are not well-defined, it is unlikely they will achieve success.
Also on this episode, the panel discusses Climeworks’ call to differentiate CDR from emissions cuts, as well as Stanford’s new CDR program and some controversy surrounding it.
One of the authors, Holly Buck, joins us today to talk about this important research. And returning to our policy panel is another leading expert in the legalities of CDR- Wil Burns, the Co-Director at the Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy at American University.
On This Episode
Resources
Holly’s Research on Residual Emissions
Chronicle of Higher Education Article on Stanford + Oil Companies
Connect with Nori
Nori’s other podcast Reversing Climate Change
Nori’s CDR meme twitter account
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: Hello, everybody, and welcome to our May 12th edition of Carbon Removal Newsroom. Today we will be doing our policy panel. I am joined by Will Burns, Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University. Hi, Will.
Wil Burns: Hi.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And also, as always, Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo. Hi, Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: Hello.
Unknown speaker: How are you? I’m good.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And as always, Radhika Mulgothkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. Before we get this episode kicked off, I am excited to announce that Will will be joining us starting in July as our regular co-host for policy. So we are super excited to have his very knowledgeable presence on the show. So thanks, Will, for doing that.
Wil Burns: Oh, thanks for inviting me. It’ll be great to be with both of you on a regular basis.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, we are super excited. And ours are everybody at NORI who has heard that you’re joining. So thank you. Following 2015’s UN Paris Agreement, each country that signed submits a plan indicating how they intend to decarbonize their economy. While much of the work comes from cutting emissions, plans can also include a residual emissions category. That’s where carbon removal comes in. But recent research from our panelists, Holly Buck and her colleagues found no standard definition of residual emissions. Imagine that. And residual emissions are significant. Most come from agriculture, industry, and mobility.
Crucially, land use sinks won’t offset all residual emissions by 2015, meaning many countries hope new CDR technologies come online and are reliable. For the world to meet climate goals, countries must receive the ambition set out in their plans. If those plans are not well defined, it is unlikely that it will happen or even be measurable in any meaningful way. So we’ll start with that discussion and then we’ll move on to discuss Climeworks’ call to differentiate CDR and emissions cuts as well as Stanford’s new CDR program that was formed with the input of oil companies.
But to kick it off, let’s start with you, Holly. Can you just give us an overview of your paper and how these climate plans work and how they use residual emissions?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so this paper was co-authored with colleagues, several colleagues who are focusing on mitigation deterrence and carbon removal. So that’s kind of the background context. We’re trying to dig into what the assumptions of residual emissions are. Are we headed for a net zero where there’s still a lot of fossil fuel use that’s canceled out by CDR or a net zero that has less emissions overall? These plans are submitted to the UNFCCC under the Paris Agreement, but I shouldn’t actually call them plans. So I want to be really clear on this.
These are long-term low emissions development strategies. So plan implies something that’s far more specific than what these strategies are. These strategies are more like A country saying what its approach is going to be. And often these feature several different scenarios for how they might get in that direction. For it to be a plan, I think it would have to be actually like voted on through legislation and finance and all of that. So these are just kind of more general high level documents about what they might do to reach these goals.
Over 50 countries have submitted these strategies. And like what we found, residual emissions are really not well defined in these plans. They don’t have a standard definition. Only around half of countries quantify them. Many of them don’t mention them explicitly. They might just have a graph that shows some ongoing emissions without really talking about it. And we found that they are pretty significant. I mean, the average country in our sample is still having about 18% of current emissions at mid-century at net zero 2050. And so if you extrapolate from that, you’re looking at double digit gigaton CDR infrastructure that would be needed to compensate for that level of residual emissions.
So we think that’s pretty important and deserves a lot more thought than it’s currently getting.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Will, how do, if they do, existing legal frameworks address the issues of residual admissions, and what kind of gaps are you seeing?
Wil Burns: Yeah, thanks. One thing I want to say at the outset is this was a great paper by Holly and the co-authors. It was something I had flirted with doing with it at some point, and they probably did a better job anyway, but I’m glad it’s out there because it’s really... We just hear this term bandied about so often, and it’s really critical in my mind that we start to operationalize what role CDR is going to have and what the implications are of non- We’re not doing that in the short to medium term.
I think quite simply, there isn’t much of a legal framework to establish this differentiation or to push us to maximally reduce emissions, which is probably going to make the most sense in the medium and long term. If you look at the Paris Agreement, for example, the mandate is simply to balance emissions and sinks by 2050 with no distinction in terms of what that composition looks like. There’s language about highest possible ambition in terms of emissions reductions and things of that sort, but that’s not Quantified in any way or operationalized in terms of policy mandates in a way that would make a difference.
And then when you get to the national level, if you look just at Holly’s and her co-author’s chart in here, which I think gives you a good sense of the landscape, There aren’t really legal mandates, right? You have countries like Sweden saying it’s essential to work to ensure that residual emissions are as small as possible. That’s nice. It’s just a statement of what we know, but doesn’t provide a roadmap to do so. And Australia similarly unhelpfully says that, you know, one of the things we could do is work to bring down the costs of very expensive technologies and hard to abate sectors, but it doesn’t say we’re going to do that or provide any funding mechanisms, any targets, any timeframes.
Any timetables, any benchmarks, all of the things that really need to be done to ensure that this happens. And, you know, it looks similar to what we see in the Climate Action Tracker, right, where you see the difference. There’s a difference between projected temperatures in terms of just pledges that have been made, as opposed to what we see as contemplated temperatures in terms of policies and measures that are actually in place. And there’s a yawning gap, right? And that’s going to be true in this context also, unless we start to provide that kind of legislative and financial mandates nationally and internationally.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I feel like what you said, Will, could apply to many aspects of our policy world.
Holly Jean Buck: Oh, yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: No doubt. But Holly, you know, Will obviously was interested in this topic. Why did you and your co-authors decide to study this?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, a lot of reasons. Partly that 2050 is coming up really quickly. We really need to be planning for this infrastructure and It’s really shocking the level of non planning we have that’s really evident in these strategies and their rudimentary nature. So you need to understand what sort of scale of CDR might be needed in order to plan for the infrastructure if it’s going to be one gigaton or 10 or more, you know, those are very different. Sorts of policies and investments we need to be spinning up today. Two, we were interested if we could get more insight into the temporalities of fossil fuel use.
Are these strategies still assuming that we’re using fossil fuels in the power sector or in transportation? Reassuringly, no, in the most ambitious scenarios. It was mostly agriculture and industrial emissions that are being compensated for in these strategies. But we need to be planning all of that as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Just as a follow-up question, Holly, to that answer is kind of based on what you guys discovered and your findings, how would you prioritize for policymakers the most critical aspects to determining how to address residual emissions?
Holly Jean Buck: I think there’s at least three things that we need to do. I think the first one is to figure out a way to make sure that removals are compensating for emissions that are truly hard to abate. This is a big problem with the whole CDR discourse right now. I think we have to start thinking of carbon removal capacity as finite because of a lot of geographical and geophysical reasons. And so you really want to allocate that capacity Capacity to things that are actually hard to abate. So there’s a policy need there.
I think we also need to create safeguards against rushes, particularly in lower income countries, rushes for land, for terrestrial carbon storage, space even for ocean carbon removal, geological sequestration capacity, renewable resources to power carbon removal technologies. If we don’t write the policy well, there could be You know, rushes to claim that capacity that could really impact people around the world. And then there’s a third challenge that countries with historical responsibility for emissions need to be delivering net negative emissions sooner to allow lower income countries some emissions after 2050. And it doesn’t seem that many countries are really thinking through that global justice dimension of it as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, Holly, just small goals there, just small little goals. Will, what legal tools and measures do you think can balance the interests of different sectors and regions while providing some sort of definition or standardization of residual emissions? Do you see any example out there that we could copy for this particular problem?
Wil Burns: I don’t see it right now. I think it’s helpful, as Holly’s study indicates, that there’s at least some recognition of this in terms of a lot of these goals. But at the same time, there’s going to have to be metrics put in place. And these metrics are going to have to cut across a lot of different A lot of different axes and we’re going to have to make a lot of value judgments, right? What is hard to abate mean? Is it based on, you know, technological constraints per se, right? That mean that we’re never going to be able to use technology.
You know, renewables and in the context of a certain production process, does it simply mean that it’s going to raise the price then from a, you know, a metric standpoint, how much can we mandate that prices. There’s a lot of emissions that you could bring out in the agriculture sector if you really start aggressively trading. We’re trying to reduce meat consumption, right? But that’s obviously going to be an extremely difficult political choice. How are we going to define those standards, right? And some of them are probably going to be so amorphous we’re never able to do that.
But there are, I think, some metrics that could be developed that would help us to divine those standards in different sectors and then try to operationalize targets based on that. And again, targets that have benchmarks along the way and a monitoring mechanism to facilitate some kind of integrity.
Radhika Moolgavkar: This question is for you both. Do you think as the SBIT further refines their definitions around net zero and maybe even develop some standards, not like the standards body, but standards like standard definitions, do you think that will help with this question? Do you think that they have the authority to help drive that conversation? Well, Will, I’ll start with you and then Holly.
Wil Burns: I think that can certainly help. They have an understanding of the sector pretty intimately compared to a lot of countries right now, quite frankly. They have, I think, some incentive to do so in terms of trying to develop a recognized high integrity standard. At the same time, of course, if this all operates in a voluntary carbon market, right, it may be that there are certain companies and countries that would simply ignore that standard because it’s more pernicious. And if we’re not distinguishing between, you know, the quality of certification frameworks, right, it remains the Wild West, right, I think, ultimately, though, S.
SBTI and Puro and folks like that may be able to provide some models that ultimately can be folded into the regulatory sector. And so I think that’s helpful. And they can develop norms, of course. And we’re at that stage where we’re looking to do that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Holly, anything you would add?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, SBTI is Science-Based Targets Initiative, correct?
Unknown speaker: Yes.
Holly Jean Buck: Just making sure, you know, the acronyms get crazy.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I know, I think I said it wrong myself, so I’m glad you clarified.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, I think that... As a sociologist, I think the formation of norms is a first step, and I think they’re well positioned to help create those norms. I’m really interested in not just what the norms are about what is hard to abate now, but how do we constantly update them as new technologies come online? And they’re one organization that may be well poised to do that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I have to say, as a non-academic, I agree with you, Holly, like, Sometimes I cannot keep all the acronyms straight and I cannot keep all the organizations straight. So with that, I’m going to move on to the next topic, which is Climeworks, who is calling for a separation of emission cuts in CDR. Last month, they are the leading DAC company right now, though there are a lot of companies who are up and coming in this space, released a statement calling for a clear distinction between emissions reductions and carbon removals.
They say that CDR cannot be a substitute for emission reductions and must not delay other forms of decarbonization. I think a bucketing like that will certainly help in making standards in this industry a lot less opaque, but Will, this language echoes what many skeptics of CDR are calling for. Does it surprise you that a DAC company would say something like this?
Wil Burns: Well, with the caveat that I can’t look into their soul, but I think there’s probably a number of motivations that would be driving a company like this to do this. One is, it’s a perilous time for the CDR industry, where there’s a lot of questioning right now about the integrity of the industry. You know, not all of it fair, the South Pole affair that you talked about, I think in your last episode, you know, even though this isn’t an avoided emissions scenario, right, I think fundamentally different than what a lot of these companies are doing.
And if you listen to the mainstream media discuss this, it’s all kind of put in one bucket, right? And so there’s increasing pressure on these companies and fear of backlash, right? So I think they’re trying, maybe trying to get ahead of that by trying to develop some stability. I think the other thing is, from a standpoint of worrying about reputation and optics, is the increasingly loud drumbeat, especially by the environmental justice community, as well as the environmental community more broadly, to argue that CDR should not play a role in climate policymaking full stop because it would permit The fossil fuel industry to continue to party like it’s 1999 in some people’s minds, right?
And so plumping for this kind of proposal, I think, could help alleviate some of those concerns, assuming there’s a way to effectively operationalize it. And so... Again, I’m not sure why they’re doing it, but I think it’s salutary to at least be discussing it. It kind of circles back to our last topic. It may be that we don’t want wholly separate mandates in the sense We still have to deal with residual emissions, but it may be that it’s something worth discussing. It’s certainly being discussed in some parts of the world and being operationalized.
Like in the European Union, for example. So that may be another reason, too, because, you know, Climeworks plays in an international sandbox and so are going to be subject to those kind of mandates. And so maybe they’re trying to get out in front.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Holly, as we as Will noted, CDR probably DAC most particularly faces criticism as a way to prop up fossil fuels. Do you think doing this differentiation between emission cuts and removals helps with the public case? From a sociological perspective, are there other things we should be thinking about to help with this argument?
Holly Jean Buck: Honestly, when it comes to the public, I’m not sure this helps because it’s still too niche. I mean, there’s a complete conflation between carbon capture and You know, carbon removal as well as recycling or solar panels, you know, even if you’re really getting to the layperson level. So I don’t think it really helps in terms of public understanding, but I do think it helps with environmental NGOs who may want to support this technology feel more comfortable about doing so. And that those people are often messengers to more general publics, so.
In that sense, maybe. Yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s a hard, it’s definitely, I’m glad that Climeworks has started the conversation more broadly. I do know the European Union also is looking at doing this, so it’ll be interesting to see where and how it’s taken. Last topic, Stanford’s Door School of Sustainability recently announced a new initiative to study how CDR can overcome barriers to scale. The school got a positive press for the announcement, but then an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the university expect topic of greenhouse gas removals following a series of meetings with Shell, ExxonMobil, and Bank of America, which somehow tainted that decision.
So I’m really curious to hear from both Holly and Will what they make of this finding and will the significant resources towards advancing CDR or the influence of the fossil industry Have that significant enough of effect in academic research, this type.
Holly Jean Buck: So just to back up and look at this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, basically it reported that Stanford held two workshops on carbon management and carbon removal. And there were two or three fossil fuel people on the organizing committee of those workshops. So thinking critically about this, two questions. One, does that mean that the workshops were influenced by fossil fuel perspectives? Two, did those workshops determine the focus of the school? So maybe a little bit on the first point. I don’t think necessarily on the second. I think they shouldn’t have had the fossil fuel people on the organizing committee.
But also, I mean, I wouldn’t overstate the influence of that because those are busy people who probably did nothing of the actual work of the workshops that, you know, that usually it’s like a grad student and a poor administrative person who are actually doing them. And there’s plenty of people at Stanford who researched greenhouse gas removal and who would have made this the focus of their work anyway. So I think the claim that the fossil fuel industry had influence over the actions of the school because of being a part of these two workshops is overstated.
And I point that out just because I think that people give over too much power to this industry when they assume that any amount of engagement means that the industry is determining the whole thing. So that said, that doesn’t mean there’s no issue generally with fossil fuel industry influence over the trajectory of carbon removal. I’m just not sure this particular place is where it lies. And I think there’s a bigger issue here of having a mental model of what is gonna happen to the fossil fuel industry. Like, have we really thought through how we want this industry to disappear?
Is it like demand shrinks and then these companies go bankrupt? Well, first you have to picture global demand shrinking, which is going to take a really long time, I’m afraid. And then two, they might be just leaving the taxpayers with all their liabilities, which is going to be a huge burden. So if that’s the plan that, okay, then like we should spell that out. I personally think we should be encouraging these companies to do Carbon management and geothermal and hydrogen and offshore wind and all these other things, because I think that’s a more realistic answer to the question of what we do with the fossil fuel industry.
And so I do think that there’s a case for them being in the room, but not on the organizing committee, because I think there’s a risk that we have a approach to greenhouse gas removal that’s too much geologic focused, DAC focused, and then we don’t have space for enhanced weathering and ocean CDR, and that would be a problem.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, anything else? It was a great answer, Holly. I loved it. Will, anything else you want to add?
Wil Burns: Well, you know, having been in the Bay Area academic sector for a couple of decades, you know, I’m always shocked in a Casablanca sense that there’s, you know, lots of oil and gas money at Stanford, right? I mean, it’s what they do, okay? And... As that article pointed out, there’s ongoing struggle inside of the university to determine investments in fossil fuel companies and the role of these companies in things like DOR, which incidentally received the largest gift that the university ever received for being stood up. So I’m not certain... Why they need Exxon’s money anyway.
But nonetheless, you know, having said that, I agree with what what Holly says. I think one interesting argument was that it could change. It could skew the orientation right to the geologic side, so it would have preferred some other representation. It’d be good to have voices in the room from the environmental justice community and others that might critique this so that they get a more balanced sort of approach and planning, whatever kind of programming they might be doing. You might be contemplating doing. But at the end of the day, we’re on this show because we all see a need for carbon removal to one degree or another.
And so I’m okay with that. With Stanford spending some of that huge largesse in trying to forward this field. And unless I see a really explicit sort of quid pro quo or messaging that seeks to prolong the life of the fossil fuel industry through these approaches, I’m not that bothered by it. And as I said, again, just not surprised.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Will, you have a history of working in interdisciplinary programs to study CDR. So what would you, knowing what you know now, what would you change about what you know of Stanford’s process? And how do you envision the academics working with the oil and gas industry? Because, well, I at least agree with Holly’s analysis. We don’t want them going bankrupt and disappearing. We need to bring them along in a meaningful way, probably.
Wil Burns: Yeah, and you know, as Chris Field, the professor at Stanford in that article pointed out, which I think is correct, and I know not all of my friends in the environmental community will agree, but I think there’s a role for the fossil fuel industry in carbon removal. They have a lot of The expertise that we’re going to need for things like pipeline conveyance and storage and so forth, and a lot of the capital that can help make this happen more quickly, and from a political economy standpoint. Right. That may be more pragmatic again than some of my environmental friends would want to be, but I see a role for them as a consequence.
And so I think not engaging with them doesn’t make sense, right? But how you do that in a way that ensures the integrity of the academic process is the question, right? So I concur with Holly. I wouldn’t have them on the planning committee. And I would try to ensure more diversity of voices than a place like Stanford often does, right? And it’s not a muscle they exercise very often, but for God’s sake, if you’re not doing it in a school of sustainability, where are you going to do it?
Radhika Moolgavkar: I will add one last note before we end the show that while it’s I just said I am totally for bringing along oil and gas. I think it’s necessary. I do think it complicates the message to the communities that we are trying to reach out to. And so communities that have been most impacted by oil and gas and then saying we’re working with oil and gas is a very difficult message, I think, to do clearly. And I hope Stanford starts figuring out how to do it correctly since they’re in a position with lots of money and lots of endowments to do it, hopefully.
All right. With that, I am going to wrap up the show. And I really appreciate, as always, Will and Holly’s insightful comments. And we will see you all next month. So looking forward to it.
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