The U.S. Senate passed the Growing Climate Solutions Act with a strong bipartisan vote. But what does the bill aim to do? And why were more Democrats against this climate bill than Republicans? Plus, a look at soil carbon sequestration’s potential and other carbon removal technologies. Finally, carbon tax proposals are moving forward in Europe— what does this mean for the U.S. and the rest of the world?
This episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom is hosted by Nori's Head of Supply and Methodology, Radhika Moolgavkar, and features panelists Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition.
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: Welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom for July 1st, 2021. As always, I am joined by Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor in Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo. Hello, Holly. How are you today?
Holly Jean Buck: Wonderful. How are you doing?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, survived the epic heat, so happy to report that Seattle is still standing after that. Though some concrete buckled here and things like that and plant and leaves literally burned. It’s been an interesting week, but we’re back to normal and that’s good. And I’m also joined by Chris Barnard, Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition. Hey, Chris, how are you?
Chris Barnard: I’m doing great, nice and cool.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s never a good sign if DC is cooler than Seattle in June. And Radhika Mugafgar, that’s me, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So today we will be discussing, as promised, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, And I’m curious about its future in the House because there are some rumblings that it’s not as popular over there. Also, we’ll talk a little bit about the carbon soil marketplace and other carbon removal technologies. Are they ready for prime time? Are they even viable still? And finally, some carbon tax proposals are moving forward in Europe.
So what does that mean for the U. S. and the rest of the world? I’ll start with the Growing Climate Solutions Act. And Chris, let’s you kick it off because I know it’s a really big deal for your organization and maybe you can give people an overview of what it is and go from there.
Chris Barnard: Absolutely. Well, the Growing Climate Solutions Act was passed a week ago today in the Senate. So it’s not into law yet. It still has to go to the House. But it left the Senate with 92 votes in favor, only eight votes against Overwhelmingly bipartisan. And so it’s essentially a two pronged bill. On the one hand, it seeks to create a certification process for carbon credits for carbon markets to be more efficient so that farmers and landowners can be connected with companies to sell carbon credits and be paid to sequester carbon.
And so there’s a certification process there that would seek to streamline the market and give kind of Institutional backing to these carbon credits, which has been a little bit of a problem in these markets until now. And the second thing is that it would create a program through the US Department of Agriculture that would essentially provide technical assistance to farmers and landowners To help them figure out the best ways for them to sequester carbon. What are the kind of technical things that they can do? How do they go about it?
How can they actually make money from these credits using land management practices, etc, etc. So it’s been really cool to see that Democrats and Republicans are coming together on this issue. Interestingly, at least, especially from my perspective is that more Democrats than Republicans voted against it, and the Democrats that voted against it are Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, and a few others. And interestingly, they were they were joined in their opposition by James Inhofe, who’s kind of the infamous Republican who brought a snowball to the Senate floor to disprove climate change and also Josh Hawley and Mike Lee, who neither of them particularly are particularly fond of this concept of climate change.
And so just a really weird paradox that you saw these super progressive Democrats that like the Green New Deal is their thing. Unite with climate skeptic Republicans to oppose a climate bill. Um, so I know I, I kind of, um, had some schadenfreude about that this last week, but yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much the growing climate solutions act.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. It’s, it’s like bipartisanship causes strange bedfellows, right? I mean, who would have guessed, but over maybe Holly, why were those Democrats, um, I read that Cory Booker vetoed it too, which was a surprise because of small farmer and environmental justice concerns. So maybe you have a little line into what they’re thinking.
Holly Jean Buck: Honestly, I’m not sure about that part of it. My read was that it’s, I mean, there’s two things basically going on. One is an opposition to offsetting and to carbon markets more generally. So The idea that some polluter is going to get off because this carbon is being sequestered by the farmers. And then secondly, concerns about efficacy. So will this actually work? Will it do anything? And what’s the point of facilitating an offset market without a cap? And so I think that if you’re looking at this act as an alternative to something better, Then sure, it doesn’t look that great, but it isn’t clear to me that there was this other great thing on the horizon that this was substituting for.
So personally, I feel like lukewarm about it, like, fine. I mean, it’s something, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Why are you a little lukewarm? What more would you have liked to have seen in the bill?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think some people were thinking about this in the frame of what do we need to do to decarbonize agriculture? Which is, you know, a much bigger conversation. And, you know, then you need to focus on things like fertilizer overuse. I mean, all the different parts of the system that are producing emissions. So this wasn’t that. I mean, this was something else.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, the flip side of that is, and I should disclose to anybody who’s listening who may not know this, Nori is a voluntary carbon marketplace. We launched in regenerative agriculture. So And soil carbon sequestration. So I might be a bit biased. I might not be my usual objective self. That being said, you know, some of these regenerative agriculture practices will force some of the changes like reduced man-made fertilizer usage. It moves it over to manure. The practices themselves should help with some of these larger questions around emission reductions by their very nature.
So it is a surprise to me that anyone would be against it. I can understand wanting more, but it’s a good starting point from my perspective, at least. So it’ll be interesting to see whether it can generate enough interest that we can start within the farming community and actually see some significant changes in the way they approach farming. Before we pivot too much, I wanted to talk about what its chances are of passing the House because I’ve also read that there’s some significant opposition in the House. So Chris, what have you been hearing about that and why would they be opposed to it exactly?
Chris Barnard: Well, the primary opposition in the House, at least on the Republican side, is coming from Congressman G. T. Thompson from Pennsylvania. And he’s kind of the ranking member on the Agriculture Committee, And he’s concerned that it would essentially Push small agricultural practices and small family farms and things like that, put them at a disadvantage compared to bigger farms that would be more able to take advantage of these types of carbon credits. And I don’t think that’s a particularly strong narrative because as far as I can tell, everyone can benefit from this equally.
And the whole point of the technical assistance is that smaller and big operations can learn from the US Department of Agriculture how to sequester carbon effectively. But that’s kind of one of the main oppositions to the bill in the House. But I mean, I think it will ultimately pass and we’re definitely working and trying to get GT Thompson’s team to come out in favor of it. And we’re definitely doing our best to try and get Republicans to support the bill. And I think the fact that 92 senators in the Senate voted for it is pretty huge, especially considering it is overtly a climate bill, growing climate solutions.
So hopefully we can kind of pull off something similar in the House.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Are there any, have you heard of any Democratic House members who are also opposed to it or too early to know?
Chris Barnard: I mean, I would presume the same crowd as kind of Bernie, Warren, Markey, I wouldn’t be surprised if AOC votes against it, because there were over 100 progressive environmental organizations that wrote a letter saying that we should oppose, that these senators and members of Congress should oppose the So I’m sure there’ll be pressure on her and some of the kind of the more progressive flank of the Democratic Party to vote in line with Sanders and Warren. But I hope it’s just not strong enough to kind of cave the entire bill.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Quite vocal. They’re not super happy with the infrastructure bill either. So it will be interesting to see how they approach this. For my humble opinion, it’s a start, right? And even if it doesn’t reduce all emissions in the sector, it’s the right direction and we should be supporting things that move us in the right direction that both parties agree to and traditionally people within the space that would be opposed to environmental regulation are actually embracing because it’s a nice combination of the private and public coming together. But there is also the question, and I think Holly, you kind of were alluding to this so we can kind of move on, about whether regenerative agriculture even is worth the hype.
Holly Jean Buck: By some estimates, it has the ability to sequester about 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide globally I mean, I don’t think it can sequester 10 billion tonnes globally per year, but I think it could do a couple billion if there was a very massive, very socially complex undertaking to get farmers to work in concert towards this goal. So I think that would be pretty unprecedented. I’m not sure we have the social infrastructure to do that. And the other thing I would say about the prospects is that the science is still pretty complex.
So soil is really complex. It’s influenced by all these microbes, by land management, by climate, by soil type. And so figuring out what’s going on in the soil can be an expensive prospect. And people are hoping that we have other methods to measure it that’ll be cheaper, you know, using satellites and modeling. But there’s still a lot of work to do there to even know what’s going on.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Do you think that by finding a place to start, it’s the only way actually to push the science? I mean, that’s my viewpoint is you’ve got to You’ve got to start someplace and move directionally the right way, knowing that it’s going to change. I think the flip side of that argument and the thing that I think about a lot is that if you do that and you tank spectacularly, you could kind of blow up the whole system before it even gets started. So I don’t know if either of you have any thoughts about that.
Holly Jean Buck: I don’t think the silence is no. I think that this time is really critical because if there’s big problems or big missteps by actors right now and it sours people’s mood on it or sours investment, then it’s not clear that we get another chance right away to kind of reinvent the concept. You know what I mean?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. No, that’s exactly what I think about is the fact that We all have probably read that article about the Regen Network out of Australia. They created a carbon credit system that Microsoft bought and claimed seven tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare in Australia, which blew many people’s minds. We’ll see if they meet those projections or not. I would say for our listeners, Nori averages about 0. 55 tonnes of CO2 sequestered per acre of land in the US. So vastly different scales. And if that fails, will that mean like a Microsoft is out of that marketplace?
I think about that a lot. And then if soil is complicated, as far as I know, other types of nature-based CDR aren’t even close. So I don’t know if either of you think about Industrial DAC is the next solution, which has its own issues, but curious if either of you think about those as the way to go next, be our next focus.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, that’s something we’ve talked about before in this podcast is like, should we focus just on natural solutions or just on technology? And I mean, I think we kind of all settled on the fact that you need a bit of both. To be able to kind of most effectively address it. Obviously it comes from different sources. Farmers and foresters and whatnot, they won’t be involved in direct air capture, at least like technologically. And so that’s more kind of something where the Department of Energy would be involved in kind of funding early stage research.
And then also there seems to be interest from some kind of the major fossil fuel companies who seem to think that if they get this technology To be more effective enough that they can actually capture their emissions and continue using certain fossil fuels. So, I mean, I certainly support the investment in it and trying to get there. And I think that it is important to kind of complement the natural direction with a technological approach as well. I just don’t really know what the economics are behind it at this point.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, there was that article that was saying that, you know, we need to kind of follow the cost curve of the solar industry, you know, upwards of a few multiple hundreds of million or a billion dollars worth of investment from the government. The huge assumption, of course, being that the technological curve will follow the solar curve, which is an unknown. But Holly, I do have a question about kind of DAC and its use in to create quote unquote carbon neutral fuels through enhanced oil recovery. So to me, that seems like the absolute moral hazard that we talk about a lot in terms of, I mean, it’s not technically removal from the air, but point source capture.
Wondering what your thoughts are about that. And when they make these big announcements about capturing carbon dioxide only to Use it to create, quote unquote, carbon neutral fuels.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, my worry is that this is going to crush public support for DAC. And so I just want to differentiate for listeners that there’s different ways of getting to what’s being conceived of as a lower carbon or carbon neutral or possibly carbon negative fuel. What we’ve seen recently is just pairing Fossil fuels with offsets. So that’s one formulation, right? And then you can actually turn CO2 into fuels, DAC to fuels, without dealing with the oil industry quite so much. That’s another separate thing. And then you can have a process where you have direct air capture And use that captured CO2 to inject underground into a depleted oil well and get out more oil.
And then that product ostensibly has a different life cycle analysis, carbon neutral, possibly carbon negative, very context dependent. But so there’s lots of stuff going on within this whole realm of Lower carbon fossil fuels that I think is very confusing to people and very problematic in terms of having people’s first introduction to this technology be from the fossil fuel industry, which is basically socially toxic.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, I think that was sort of what I was trying to get at when I, which I didn’t do very eloquently, honestly, is that there’s so much hype around the soil marketplace within the Biden administration and within the U. S. And I’m wishing there is hype around DAC, but I’m not hearing it quite as much. Maybe it’s my own bias. I don’t know. But I feel like the government needs to be thinking, and I think they are, but needs to be more visible and vocal and hopefully the Also, the Senate and the House around these non-nature-based solutions and figuring out and helping the technology develop.
Because I kind of hear the same thing you talked about, Holly. It can’t be an oil and gas creation. It’s got to be a neutral creation.
Holly Jean Buck: And it might actually be too late for that. I mean, there’s been tremendous advocacy around carbon capture use and storage, CCUS, from the fossil fuel industry. And I’m very worried about what that means for direct air capture because it’s all being conflated.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it’s funny you say that because I made that same point to somebody I work with just the other day that he’s like, you can’t, don’t say it like this. And I’m like, but that’s how the government talks about it. So we’ve got this weird conflating to your point that people don’t understand all the subtleties. And honestly, I’m not sure that I do, even though I work in it because it is so complex and there are so many things happening all the time. Finally today I wanted to talk a little bit more about the carbon taxes that are coming up and so Chris wanted to hopefully you can explain to our listeners what carbon leakage is, which is kind of what is driving carbon taxes across the world, I guess.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean carbon leakage is essentially the concept that emissions can rise in one country because climate policies or measures or regulations are super stringent in another country and cause business To go to this country where the regulations are less stringent because it’s easier to do business. And as a result, they go there and emit carbon emissions there rather than in the original country. And then you’ve not actually solved the problem of trying to reduce emissions in the first place. And so this applies to regulation, making it very difficult for Companies to pollute, say in the US and they might go to other countries, but it was it would also apply to, for example, if you introduced a carbon tax at home and so you would start to tax the emissions in the United States, then companies would just get up, leave the United States and go somewhere else where they can conduct business without being taxed for their emissions and then sell products back to the US and then completely bypass the system.
And so it’s interesting, the IMF did this blog post talking about how the only way to overcome this would be some kind of global minimum price floor for a kind of global carbon tax to avoid this type of leakage. And that would essentially make sure that you can’t just produce dirty goods in one country and then export them to a country with higher climate regulations and then ultimately you don’t solve the problem. So that’s kind of the concept of carbon leakage.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And what do you think of that global carbon floor price?
Chris Barnard: I mean, I think it’s utterly unrealistic. We can’t even get a carbon tax in the US or basically most other countries in the West, let alone get a carbon tax that the entire world would agree on, let alone at $75, which is incredibly high. So yeah, I just don’t think it’s realistic at all. It’s kind of like a An IMF theoretical blog post more than anything else. But it does bring up this valid point of we should think of measures to try and ensure that carbon leakage doesn’t happen. And that’s a real conversation that needs to be had, but I think it’s completely unrealistic to think of a globally enforced carbon price minimum.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Are those conversations happening right now in the US, Chris? I know they’re happening in the EU, obviously, but what’s happening over here?
Chris Barnard: To have a carbon tax, you mean?
Radhika Moolgavkar: No, just about carbon leakage and policies to ensure it, especially when you’ve got NAFTA. I mean, we’ve got competing interests, let’s just put it like that. So have these carbon stations even started?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, Biden’s kind of talked about how he would be in favor of some kind of carbon border adjustments, which means that goods coming into the U. S. would... Pay a certain amount of money depending on how much carbon is created in the production of those goods. And that’s essentially to prevent carbon leakage. And so he’s talked about that. And the EU is kind of heavily in discussions to put a system like that in play, which would probably give political and international cover for Biden to do something similar. But when the EU pushed Biden over at the G7, he was kind of a little bit hesitant.
Japan was also not very interested in it. I’m not, I’m not sure if there would be some kind of global agreement that there would probably be kind of a domino effect if the EU does it. And if the EU and even like the UK or another major economy would do it, then there would be some domino effect because the US would have to kind of think of the fact that Now they can’t really export to the EU much because there’s no reciprocal agreement on that. So I think there might be kind of a first mover advantage that is necessary here to make this happen rather than waiting for some agreement that everyone can agree on at the same time.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Holly, I think one of the criticisms of this, right, is it again will disproportionately impact countries that have been less involved in polluting, but now, you know, basically the global south. What are your thoughts about this tax? Which I think is there’s some tension there between equity issues and sustainability and global warming issues.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, in terms of the carbon border adjustments, I think that on one hand, at first glance, there’s a reaction like, oh, it’s good to make our new green industrial infrastructure competitive. But there’s a really good opinion piece this week Published in Tech Review by Arvind Ravikumar. And he discusses how really, I mean, he says unilateral carbon border adjustments merely represent the latest form of economic imperialism because the global north has financed these fossil fuel plants in the developing world. They’ve outsourced their manufacturing there. And he says it’s hypocritical to promote that kind of development and then punish developing countries for their emissions.
So I think that’s a strong argument that we need to be thinking about.
Radhika Moolgavkar: But then the follow-up question is, though, how do you then ensure that the cost of carbon is somehow part of the goods, right? So that it drives transition to new types of technologies that are cleaner. I don’t know if there’s an answer, but if either of you have a thought about that, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking.
Chris Barnard: I mean, some of the proposals that I’ve heard coming more from the pro market conservative side is obviously a kind of carbon border adjustment or global carbon minimum price would be kind of a stick approach. And so the opposite carrot approach would be to get rid of all the Trade barriers to the free trade of environmental goods and services. So that would be kind of physical goods like solar panels and wind turbines and nuclear technology and all those kinds of things, but also services. So financial industries that are specifically working on climate issues, knowledge, workers, things like that.
And there’s a strong argument that by getting rid of those trade barriers, you would actually provide a huge kind of boost to the global market for different countries to trade these technologies and to kind of have a flow of information between them. Because right now, it’s actually pretty incredible how high the tariffs are on some of these things. And that obviously stymies, it’s kind of forcing each country to come up with the technology and the things for itself, rather than sharing the burden. And in Germany, you might be good at Kind of certain technological aspect in Japan, something else in Australia, something else in the US, something else that right now each country kind of has to do it by itself.
And so if you can share that, I think leveraging global trade in the direction of clean energy would actually be a pretty powerful alternative to this type of policy.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that’s a great idea. Holly, anything you want to add or include?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, maybe some of this stuff would be more equitable if it was paired with more climate-focused wealth transfers. That’s all I’ve got to say on that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I think what we realize is, as everyone knows, a very complex issue. There are competing interests, even within groups that are all supportive Sustainability and moving forward in terms of carbon removal and different types of greening up of our infrastructure for lack of a better term. So we’ll just continue to talk about it and hope that someday we get where we need to be. So finally today, for my little good news piece, and I’m just putting you both on notice that we’ll probably talk about this more in depth next week, is the White House did send a report to Congress about developing carbon capture usage and storage, as Holly mentioned earlier, CCUS.
And that’s technologies that, well, in the statement of the White House, both remove carbon dioxide at a point source, like from a power company, or remove carbon dioxide directly from the air. And so... This is, at least to me, a step in the right direction that we are starting to look more broadly than just soil and supporting technologies that need innovation from the government. So I’m looking forward to seeing what that report causes Congress to do, and maybe some node bills will be drafted. Time will tell. But with that, I will say thank you to both of you for again joining me on a lovely carbon removal newsroom.
And I look forward to talking to you both next week. Oh, and enjoy the 4th of July weekend. You know, let’s see some fireworks this year. Hopefully you’ll all get to enjoy that as we emerge from COVID. So take care, everybody. Thanks for listening. Bye.
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