Earlier this week the IPCC released its report on climate mitigation. It recommended enormous funding levels to deploy renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions from power generation while suggesting more funding still to research and invent the technologies needed to decarbonize other emitting sectors.
Under any future scenario, carbon removal is necessary to limit warming. Any pathway that leads to 1.5 degrees of warming, and nearly all that lead to 2 degrees of warming, include large-scale use of forestry, BECCS, and DAC.
The report finds that a wide range of stakeholders will need to move fast to deploy high levels of many different types of negative emissions approaches.
Joining Radhika on this episode to discuss this 3000-page report is Simon Nicholson, the Co-Director of the American University Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy.
Simon and Radhika take a look at the recommendations mean, how the report finds CDR scale-up might be achieved, and what are some of the implications for businesses, governments, and civil society?
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 the one day late Friday April 8 2022 science edition of carbon removal newsroom I apologize that we’re a day late, but I have been traveling so we could not make the normal Thursday recording happen. Today I am super excited because I’ve been on a panel with him before and I’m always was so impressed with what he had to say. To have Simon Nicholson, the co-director of the American University Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy on the show. Hi, how are you?
Simon Nicholson: Doing well, thanks for the invitation.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I’m really excited to chat with you today. And just myself as the other co-host, so Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. Today, we’re going to be talking about the third of three reports that was released by the IPC on climate mitigation. It recommended enormous funding levels to deploy renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions from power generation, while suggesting more funding to research and invent the technologies needed to decarbonize other emitting sectors. But as a continuing theme, carbon removal continues to be something that they are advocating for and believing in.
Unfortunately, under any future scenario, carbon removal is necessary to limit warming, and I only say that’s unfortunate because pretty much all pathways lead to about 1. 5 degrees of warming, and nearly all also lead to two degrees of warming, even if you include large-scale uses of forestry, BECCS, and DAC. The report also found that a wide range of stakeholders will need to move forward fast to deploy high levels of many different types of negative emission Approaches. And so kind of what does this mean today for our business governments and civil society?
And today, as I said, joining us to discuss this 3000 page report is Simon. So first off, Simon, maybe you can give our listeners just a recap of the IPCC process. What does working group three mean and kind of the overall focus of the report and how it lands chronologically with these other two reports that preceded it.
Simon Nicholson: Thanks. And there’s a helicopter flying overhead. I’m in Washington, D. C. just as we begin to speak. So the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the United Nations mandated body responsible for assessing periodically global climate science. And so the IPCC is made up of hundreds of scientists from across the world And the main thing that they do is they review the science which is out there in the world in journals and so forth. And they help us understand what we know collectively, we human beings about climate change. The main thing that the IPCC does is every five years or so release these assessment reports, these big, as you said, 3,000 pages or more review of the scientific literature.
This is the sixth assessment cycle that we’re going through right now. So these reports have been coming out over the last 18 months or so. And as you’ve signaled Radhika in your intro, the reports are organized around different working groups. So the IPCC has three different working groups. The first working group looks at the physical state of climate science. The second working group at impacts associated with climate change. And this third working group report, which was just released, is concerned with mitigation pathways. So to say that more clearly, working group one is how did we get into this mess?
Working group two, how bad is the mess? And working group three, what do we need to do about it?
Radhika Moolgavkar: And just from a purely curiosity perspective, how do they coordinate all of these scientists across all these vast regions in Create consensus in what I would imagine is not a totally settled area.
Simon Nicholson: Yeah, I mean, there’s a long answer. I’ll try and get the slightly shorter version. Lots and lots of meetings. There are lead authors, coordinating chapter authors, an established process of review by which some pieces of the scientific literature are assessed across multiple different pieces of these working groups. The working groups themselves have to coordinate so that there’s consistency across the different working groups and their assessment work. And then ultimately the summaries have to go through a political process. So the government sign off on what’s called the summary for policymakers. So there’s a political aspect to the process as well.
And in the age of Zoom, it has been of course even more complicated because people can’t get into rooms together for the most part. And so hours and hours and hours of time from some of the leading scientists in the world is the answer to how this process takes place.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And what is the official body that signs off for the US? Political body that you mentioned.
Simon Nicholson: For the US, so the United States has State Department representation in the political process that ultimately signs off on behalf of the United States on the report.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, thank you for indulging me on those questions. I’ve always been curious on how you can wrangle so many people and get something moving. I’m sure you’ll be starting on the next report tomorrow because it probably takes five years to get through all of this. So this report was focused on mitigation. And was there any new science that was kind of discussed in this report on mitigation? Or is this all about existing science? And how does it come together in the sense that how do you choose which Areas of the science to focus on because it’s so broad.
Simon Nicholson: Yeah, so the IPCC as a body is not responsible for doing its own science. It’s a review body, so it looks at the science, which is already out there. But of course, many of the people who are part of the IPCC are also responsible for the creation of the science, right, which the body then assesses. What they do is that they create a cutoff date. So anything that’s published by a certain cutoff date can find its way into the report. And so in the science of the community, there’s always a scramble when the IPCC announces its cutoff date to try and get stuff published so that it can be assessed by the body, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: It sounds like the Oscars a little bit. You got to get your moving.
Simon Nicholson: Yeah. Kind of like that, I guess, for the scientists. And then what the IPCC does is it tries to assess basically the full sweep of science which is out there, you know, that they try and collect absolutely everything. And these scientists read thousands and thousands of papers. And then it goes through the process by which you try and work out what’s known with what level of certainty and with what level of agreement across the literature, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Okay.
Simon Nicholson: And so when you read these IPCC reports, they always have little brackets out to the statements, known with less certainty or more certainty. And that’s the review process, this expert analysis of the literature. How much do we actually know about something? And is there disagreement within the literature about something? And that then gets reflected in the language that’s used in the report.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So you can have high certainty and high disagreement? Is that a possibility even?
Simon Nicholson: No, so if there were high certainty about something, meaning that we have a good amount of information or science on it, but in the literature there’s lots of disagreement, then a phrase like medium certainty would be used in the report to try and capture the fact that there was lots of disagreement in the literature.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Okay, that makes sense. So yeah, it’s quite a process, obviously. Lots of people involved, and lots of subjectivity and objectivity at the same time. How all of these things are on a scale. So I’m curious what the authors found about carbon removal in these mitigation schemes and your thoughts around how they characterize the readiness of carbon removal.
Simon Nicholson: So, I mean, a number of things to say. In addition to these periodic assessment reports, the IPCC also puts out special reports from time to time, right? And as most folks listening will know, there was a special report from the IPCC on the 1. 5 degree target from the Paris Agreement just a few years ago. In that 1. 5 report, The IPCC was tasked with trying to work out whether the world could stay beneath the 1. 5 degree warming threshold and what that might take. And it was made very clear from that report that carbon removal needs now to be a part of the mitigation conversation.
It’s hard to imagine staying beneath 1. 5 degrees without probably large amounts of carbon removal. This Working Group 3 report from the sixth assessment cycle Continues that conversation. It’s saying very much the same sorts of things about the need for carbon removal if the world is serious about 1. 5 or even 2 degrees. So there’s that piece of it. And then this report does some sharpening. And it sharpens in some interesting ways. I mean, one of the things we see from this Working Group 3 report is An argument that carbon removal is going to be needed not just in the long term, but is in fact going to be needed in the short term to tackle climate change, right?
So it says, look, there are three roles. This new report says basically there are three roles for carbon removal when it comes to tackling climate change. The first role is to help to, alongside emissions abatement and all of the other work that we need to do with mitigation, we need carbon removal now As we try to slow global warming in the near term. The second role is in the kind of short to medium term to help to offset against how to abate sectors. Things like aviation, heavy industry, there’s going to be a need for carbon removal for as long as fossil fuels are being used in those industries or sectors.
And then the third role, which we’re all kind of aware of is down the road, Using carbon removal to try and deal with legacy emissions, the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, particularly an overshoot scenario. So if the world starts to warm too much, carbon removal might be needed down the road to try and return to more livable temperatures. So when you add all of that together, what the IPCC seems to be saying is we can’t wait.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yep.
Simon Nicholson: Work needs to happen now on carbon removal because it’s needed alongside other forms of mitigation. And also we need to know what’s out there, right? Because if it turns out that lots of investigation now reveals that certain carbon removal pathways are going to be too difficult, that would be worth knowing right now in the near term before we bank too much on those things materializing down the road.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it’s such an interesting question, right? I had your former colleague Wil Burns on a few weeks ago and we were talking about Ocean CDR and it feels like people are very excited about that space, right? But to your point, we actually don’t know how effective it is. We haven’t done like the basic scientific research and how much do we want to get excited about something that we know so little about really in terms of its You know, mitigation and impacts in other ways. So I’m, I’m glad that the scientific community is sort of starting to try to grapple with that because it was always a little bit concerning to me that they were wanting to push this down the road till later.
And I’m glad because it seems like later is now. But I wonder, from your perspective, and this kind of harkens back to some of the conversation we had on the panel, a little bit outside the science piece, but How do you deal with one, the moral hazard question that people always raise, right? Like, oh, hard to abate, then they won’t even try to abate. And two, how do you deal with communities who feel like carbon removal will in the end be worse for them? I’m talking specifically about communities of color who have definitely seen the worst end of oil and gas and can’t see through to working with oil and gas.
To develop these technologies, which probably will be necessary in order to move carbon removal forward.
Simon Nicholson: You don’t miss around. These are some of the big questions. So starting with this IPCC report, one thing that the report makes clear is the less work done now to clean up energy and food and transportation systems, the more reliance will be needed down the road on carbon removal. It’s something we know, but the scenarios in the report make that starkly clear. The work needs to start now on all of the work that we’ve needed to do for decades, and that we’ve been too slow on. And so if we’re concerned about those moral hazard questions and about negative potential impacts from carbon removal, then we should double down collectively on doing all of the other stuff that needs to be done.
The broader questions about moral hazard and impacts on particularly vulnerable and frontline communities, we’re going to be wrestling with those for as long as we’re trying to wrestle with climate change. Part of the response is that there are no easy answers anymore when it comes to climate response. It’s not like trying to clean up the energy system isn’t necessarily going to always be to the benefit, for instance, of frontline communities. Because how that gets done, who has the say in the technologies that get utilized, where minerals come from, all of these sorts of things are going to have impacts on people.
And so I’m dancing around the question in part because there’s no easy answer to it, Radhika. Part of what we’re doing from the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy, as you know, is trying to understand the sorts of conversations that need to take place so that environmental justice perspectives and communities are more present in the carbon removal evaluation and broader conversation. And at the moment, environmental justice communities in some ways feel shut out from the conversation or have made strategic determination Just an assessment based on past interactions with policymakers and with fossil fuel interests that it’s not worth getting involved in the conversation.
And so carbon removal options are packaged along with others as false solutions. Right? And it’s totally understandable that’s the starting point, because it’s too easy to imagine carbon removal being used as a lifeline for the oil and gas industry. It’s too easy imagining carbon removal options being deployed in ways that just reinforce historic harms, right, that make things worse for the very communities that climate action should be helping.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yep.
Simon Nicholson: But at the same time, we’ve got to get over that, right? We’ve got to get over the false solutions framing to some extent because the science makes just abundantly clear that some amounts, probably large amounts of carbon removal are going to be necessary. So with that as the starting point, carbon removal will be necessary. But what we say at the Institute is that not all forms of carbon removal are created equal. We need kind of deep investigation conversations that involve everybody who might be impacted so that we can understand how to do this stuff right.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. I mean, it’s and I don’t know if you have perspective on this, but it’s such a to me interesting carbon removal is such an interesting intersection of science, policy, social justice. Um, that it’s, there’s so many competing interests, but also so little time that to build the trust almost feels like we don’t have time to build the trust that we’re trying to solve problems that we didn’t create, but are kind of being pushed on us, but we don’t have the time to like do enough work. So they feel, so there is a level of comfort.
I mean, I’m just thinking about the USDA RFP that came out a couple of weeks, months ago or a month ago. Where they wanted people to respond in eight weeks to this huge thing. And my first thought was actually what you had said at that panel we were on. That is not enough time for an environmental justice group who’s not very, very sophisticated and is likely not somebody representing the frontline communities to even think about it, let around respond to it. And so I see the same problems being perpetuated, but on the other hand, I see why they need to happen because you want to move quickly to solve these problems and how you resolve that time tension.
I don’t even begin to have a solution for, honestly.
Simon Nicholson: Those of us immersed in carbon removal conversations, we push a certain type of urgency because our identities in some ways, the work that we’re doing is wrapped up. And making sure that attention is paid to us. And look, we know that if you look at the political situation in the United States, windows close. It feels like it’s important to get work done right now around carbon removal in the US context. Lots of reasons to talk about an accelerated timeframe. And at the same time, what we’re hearing from environmental justice communities is that a whole bunch of things are urgent.
And the sorts of things that have been urgent to those communities for a long time have not received any attention or inadequate attention. And so pushing this as one more urgent thing, it doesn’t make any sense. We have to understand that building trust and opening room for conversations and making sure that we do all of this in the right ways, it really will take some time.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And maybe it’s one of those things where the tortoise beats the hare in the long run, right? You just sort of have to be okay with your impatience, live in it, but do the work necessarily to build the coalitions to actually have long-term success. I like to think about it like that, and I hope that’s how we end up Moving forward, but I’ll pivot away from these conversations and ask a little bit more about the report. I could go on and on. This is something I really find fascinating. But so kind of what types of carbon removal do they suggest in this in the report?
And do you have an idea of like in what types of quantities or in each decade, what kind of scaling do we need to see?
Simon Nicholson: That’s complicated because the report does a lot of different things with scenarios that is trying to imagine different pathways into the future and different scenarios have different amounts of carbon removal in them based on a whole set of different assumptions. So to pick up the first question of what forms of carbon removal are in the report, well even that is interesting and complicated Because of the way that the scenarios processes that the IPCC utilizes deal with carbon removal. So just very quick background, the IPCC scenarios process utilizes models called the Integrated Assessment Models.
These are models that bring together an understanding of the economy with an understanding of the energy system, sometimes with land use, sometimes with oceans and various other things. And what these models try to do is take a set of assumptions on the front end and then project into the future different pathways that would ultimately keep underneath different warming thresholds. These integrated assessment models for quirky reasons that don’t really bring in a whole bunch of different carbon removal options. In fact, when you go back to the 1. 5 degree report, that special report that we talked about earlier, The integrated assessment models only had afforestation and BEX, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage in the models.
And so if you read that report, literally it says we need huge amounts of BEX by the end of the century if we’re going to meet these target goals. But that’s not really what the report means. That’s not what the models are telling us. The models are telling us we need lots of carbon removal. But the models only show that carbon removal through BECCS or afforestation.
Radhika Moolgavkar: A little legacy modeling issue. I mean, that’s pretty fascinating.
Simon Nicholson: Yeah, it’s wild. And the translation of the lines in those reports into the public conversation and the policymaking gets super complicated because the IPCC is focused on the science and not necessarily focused on the public messaging. And so you can interpret lots of things into these reports that aren’t actually meant by them. In this most recent report in the Working Group 3 piece of the sixth assessment cycle, again, there’s afforestation and there’s BECCS, and to some limited extent in some of the modeling runs, there was direct air capture. But there’s no enhanced mineralization.
There’s no ocean stuff. And so again, when you look at these scenario sections of the report, what they say is we need lots of afforestation and BICs. But again, what that means is there’s probably going to be a need for lots of carbon removal of all types. You’re going to meet these temperature targets. In terms of amounts, Basically, this sixth assessment report seems to be consistent with what we heard from the 1. 5 report, in that hundreds of gigatonnes of gross removals will be needed over the remainder of the century.
Just by way of context, one of the things this report makes clear is that something like 50 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide are going into the atmosphere every year right now from human sources. About 65 gigatonnes when other gases that contribute to climate change are taken into account. And then by mid-century, this report is suggesting somewhere between one to 10 gigatonnes per year will have to be taken out of the atmosphere per year. If the 1. 5 target is to be met. In big overshoot scenarios, so if we go way beyond 1.
5, then way more carbon removal would be needed later in the century to bring the world back to that 1. 5 target. If the world turns it around on emissions starting today, then less carbon removal will be needed. So the report makes those sorts of distinctions clear as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s a sliding scale, right? What we do today impacts how much we have to get our scaling of carbon dioxide removal up. So was there one piece of the report or around carbon removal in particular that struck you as particularly interesting or new or something that is being overlooked when either policymakers or the public think about this conversation?
Simon Nicholson: Well, I think the new thing for me is also kind of an old thing, but it was sharply stated in the report. It is this idea that carbon removal is not just a long-term proposition that’s needed now. And so I think this idea that carbon removal in the context of how to abate sectors is going to be needed starting tomorrow and over the next few decades has to be a part of the policy conversation much more strongly moving forward. Now what that means is we’re gonna have discussion, we’re gonna have fights over what a hard to abate sector is, correct?
I mean, if you take aviation, flying around in airplanes, there are basically three things we could do. You could reduce or prevent flying. And lots of ways to do that with carbon taxes or by making other forms of transportation more attractive or make flying socially undesirable or culturally undesirable. Lots of different things could happen in that bucket. The second possibility is fuel switching. So move to lower carbon biofuels, for instance, and start to wean off fossil-based jet fuel. But then what else have you got? The third bucket is using carbon removal elsewhere to clean up the emissions that are coming from continuing to fly people and goods around the planet.
The extent to which aviation is actually a hard to abate sector depends to some large extent on that first bucket. How much collectively are we willing to give up flying?
Radhika Moolgavkar: I often feel like to make the policy and sustainability arguments work, the more you ask people to sacrifice, the less it feels like it is And as you know, I know that’s not the most scientifically sound thing, but I often come from a perspective of practicality and what can we get done? And I don’t think anyone wants to give up flying and it’s become part of life. And even if you can change it in the US, can you change it in China and India and Africa, other countries that are in a different part of their life cycle, if you will, middle class life cycle?
Yeah, I tend towards the two, which is let’s try to reduce the emissions as much and then the three, but it could be the wrong answer. I don’t know.
Simon Nicholson: Well, you know, it’s kind of an open question. We’re going to be discussing vigorously into the future. And you can look to places like France, which have, I think I’m right on this, that have basically banned short-haul flights now, right, and forced people to take high-speed trains. Now, you can imagine in the United States, if we actually bought out a function, built out a functioning high-speed rail network, that taking trains might actually be more attractive for short-haul trips than hopping on an airplane, right? And again, if you price carbon, Then people will start to make these decisions based on their pocketbooks.
And so all of these things fall into that first bucket and will be important moving forward. The IPCC report actually deals with this in a new and distinct way. In this most recent Working Group 3 report, talking about social actions, talking about the capacity for cultural change, really taking account of justice considerations in the decision making, not just economic feasibility and the desires of the most powerful.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah.
Simon Nicholson: Right. So all of this is of a mix, right? Carbon removal can’t be thought of just as, you know, the magical solution, which is going to make all of our problems go away. We’ve got to have a conversation that looks across all of these different dimensions.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. And I just have to throw in from because it comes from my background working in government. But if we really want to create functioning transit systems, we also have to figure out how to do it economically and Efficiently and permitting and all these things make it so difficult to actually create really good, high quality railroad corridors and even light rail solutions within these cities. And so I don’t know, policymakers need to be thinking also about how to make these hard to abate sectors easier to abate, I guess. And that means doing unsexy work, like making permitting easier and rethinking some of these approaches that we’ve just been doing over and over, but only lead to spiraling costs.
Well, we’re almost out of time. So anything else that, Simon, you wanted to highlight from the report or anything else you would like our listeners to be thinking about after this release?
Simon Nicholson: No, I think we’ve covered a whole bunch of ground there. I really appreciate the conversation.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, this has been fantastic. I always end my shows with a little bit of good news. I try to steer it towards sustainability. I have taken creative license and I’m going to take creative license again this week and just say that I was pretty excited to see Tiger Woods back playing at the Masters. Really random. I’m not a golfer. I am no zero interest in it, but you know, who doesn’t like a nice resurrection story in this day and age where it feels like there’s a lot of bad news. It’s nice to see a guy who has pushed through some pretty unbelievable events and things in his life to, you know, be able to walk around on the masters again.
So good job, Tiger. I’m sure you don’t listen to this podcast, but I’m rooting for you. And Simon, thank you so much for joining me this week. I really enjoyed our conversation. I can’t wait to see the work that you guys figure out, particularly around the equity and social justice questions, and look forward to how I can incorporate some of those findings and discoveries into my own work on a daily basis. So thank you so much.
Simon Nicholson: Yeah, thanks for all you do, Radhika. I appreciate the conversation today.
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