In January of 2022, New York Assemblymember Patricia Fahy and State Senator Michelle Hinchey introduced the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act. The proposed legislation aims to use public procurement of carbon removal to help meet the state’s emissions reductions goals by purchasing enough removals to cover the state’s “hard-to-abate” sector’s by 2050- 15% of the state’s 1990 emissions.
Under this law, the state will use reverse auctions to purchase measurable and verifiable removals. The legislation also mandates that community benefits and job creation factor into the auction.
CDRLA was developed by a grassroots, online, volunteer climate advocacy community called the OpenAir Collective. Last year, OpenAir advocates successfully wrote and championed a bill in New York State that aims to decarbonize the concrete sector there. Members of the group are also working on other projects, such as building several open-source direct air capture prototypes.
In this episode Radhika and Chris are joined by OpenAir’s Toby Bryce who describes how the legislation was created through their organization’s open-source approach and how the law will work if it becomes law. Chris dives into how this kind of legislation could work from a convservative point of view, and how reverse auctions can be an effective way for public procurement to support competitive markets.
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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 February 10th, 2022 episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom. Today, we’ll be focusing on policy, and as such, we have Toby Bryce, who works on CDR Policy Advocacy with the Open Air Collective. Toby, so nice to have you on the show.
Toby Bryce: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I’m a big fan of all your Open Air Collective YouTube shows. I regularly watch those, so thanks for bringing those up. And then as always, we have Chris Barnard, Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition. Hi, Chris.
Chris Barnard: Hello, how are you?
Radhika Moolgavkar: I’m doing well, thank you. And finally, myself, Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So today we are going to be focusing on the Open Air Collective’s new legislation that they have brought forth in New York, which is called the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act. It was brought to the Assembly in January of 2022 by Patricia Fay and State Senator Michelle Hinchy. And it is a proposal that’s aimed to use public procurement of carbon removal to help meet the state’s emission reductions goals by purchasing enough removals to cover the hard-to-abate sectors by 2050.
So it’s a big, big bill with really big goals. And I think anyone who listens to the show thinks that’s Under this law, the state will use kind of a novel approach of auctions to purchase measurable and verifiable removals. And the legislation also mandates that the community benefits and job creation factor into the auction. So they’re also trying to make sure that historically marginalized and communities that have been forgotten in the old economy are given front and center in terms of their voice and in terms of their ability to interact and be part of this economy as it moves forward.
So it was developed by the Open Air Collective, which is really cool because the grassroots online climate advocacy community, that’s an amazing use of technology, I think, and goes to the heart of what Nori loves too, which is kind of the de-financed, de-centralized world. So with this introduction, I’m going to let Toby kind of Tell us a little bit more about the bill, who developed the policy beyond just Open Air Collective, who within the group did, and maybe also walk us through an example of how he thinks it will work.
So Toby, take it away.
Toby Bryce: Absolutely. Well, thank you again for having me on here. I’m a big fan of the show and regular listener, so it’s an honor to be here with you today. Just first of all, Open Air. So we are an open source, all-volunteer climate advocacy collective or group, and we’re really focused on the advancement of carbon removal and we have a team that works on that you’ve had on the show I think or on one of the nori shows that works on open source direct air capture machines there are a couple projects violet and cyan so that’s really cool there’s an r&d component and then I kind of work on the policy side and so We are basically an open source policy development and advocacy group on that part of the house.
And, you know, like when I moved to New York a long time ago, I had a friend who worked at a hedge fund and part of his job was to write federal legislation that he hand delivered to a senator who will remain nameless and like it became law. And like so corporations have been writing legislation probably forever. And so I think it’s really time for a For citizens to start doing it. And I think that’s one of the really cool things about open air. I think you referenced, but we developed and got one policy passed last year in New York called the Loan Body Concrete Leadership Act, which is basically a state procurement incentive to buy low carbon concrete.
And that bill is actually pending also in some other states in New Jersey and Virginia. We’ve got versions of it kind of on track in a couple other places. So our idea is like, Be a policy lab, originate a policy, get it passed somewhere, and then get it passed in other places. And so for this policy, the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act, we, you know, once the LECLA got passed last June, we started working on this in early 2001. And by working on it, I mean, we thought of the idea like, okay, we’re not going to get to gigatonne scale if the public sector does not start funding carbon removal.
So let’s figure out a way to do that. And We started basically just talking to people. And we interviewed, I would say, upwards of 50 to 60 experts in academia, like some bold-faced names in CDR. We talked to a lot of researchers in New York who are working on specific CDR pathways at New York universities like Cornell, Columbia, Stony Brook University, like the SUNY, the State University of New York has a great system that’s doing all sorts of really cool research. So we talked to people. We learned. We talked to folks in the advocacy community.
We talked to carbon removal entrepreneurs. And, you know, eventually formed kind of a thesis of what we wanted to do. And then with one of our all-star members who is a lawyer, Jamie Rogers, he drafted a bill over the summer of 21 and had a legislative draft by fall. And we started showing it to legislators, senators, and assembly members to find someone who got excited about it and wanted to lead the, you know, bring it and introduce it into the legislature. And Patricia Fay, the assembly, she’s a very powerful assembly member from Albany.
She’s fascinated by the idea, and so she agreed to take it on and introduced it at COP26, and it’s in the legislature. In New York, the legislative session runs from January until June, and there’s a lot going on. So it’s like, you know, there’s a lot of noise, or not noise, but like a lot of competing bills and ideas that we have to, you know, compete with for Mindshare, but she’s like been a great... Supporter for this bill. And then very recently, Senator Hinchey, who is kind of a, her father was a legend in New York state politics, and she is a recently elected senator from the Hudson Valley.
She’s our sponsor in the Senate. So that’s kind of how it came to be. So, you know, our idea, like we’re trying to formalize this a little bit more into a policy development process, but this is kind of our second one. So we’re learning as we go along.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. So can you describe how the CDRLA will work if it’s passed? What would the government’s role be and how would it interact with the private sector?
Toby Bryce: Well, first of all, I would say you did a fantastic job of describing it in your preamble. So basically it is so New York CDRLA is a policy framework to get the public sector to start buying durable carbon. And so the policy framework has to be adapt, and we’ll talk about this, I think, a little bit later, but it has to adapt to the specific jurisdiction where it’s being applied. So New York has a landmark net zero policy called the CLCPA, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which passed in 1990, and it mandates New York get to net zero by 2050.
And as you referenced, 85% of the net zero needs to be achieved by emissions reduction. So like You know, it bears repeating, emissions reduction must come first. Like, we must put the lion’s share of our resources in confronting the climate crisis into emissions reduction. And in New York, we’re kind of fortunate that’s been codified at 85%. So, like, we need to reduce emissions by 85% based on a 1990 baseline, which is 410 million tonnes of carbon CO2 equivalent. But the remaining 15%, the hard to evade emissions, as they’re defined in the legislation, need to be offset.
And there is kind of a Relatively weak compliance framework that’s in the existing legislation that we are kind of trying to take a pencil to and write a policy alongside the CLCPA because we’re not trying to rewrite this like landmark climate legislation that gets New York starting to buy durable carbon removal with a 2050 target of this 15%, which is 61. 5 million tonnes. So as you point out, the volumes are pretty significant. We are starting out very small because A, as everyone in the space knows, the supply is constrained right now.
So we’re starting out in 2025. The state is mandated to buy 100,000 tonnes of durable CVR. And it’s standards-based. So we have additionality, durability, verification, MRV, and then equity that are the key standards in the bill. And so the state is basically applying these standards against a pool of submissions based on a reverse auction mechanism that you pointed out earlier. And bids will come in and the state will decide what carbon removal to procure. And the reverse auction in 2025 has a cap of $350, which is the maximum average price per tonne the state can pay, which means basically the state has a $35 million budget to buy 100,000 tonnes of durable CDR.
And our durability threshold is 100 years in the bill. And it’s a transparent public process. The winning bids get published, just like our pioneer friends at Stripes do. And then the winning CDR suppliers have a 10 year delivery period. And there’s a preference in the legislation for CDR that gets delivered more quickly than 10 years. So it doesn’t have to get delivered in 2025, which I think kind of like mitigates a little bit the supply question, because I think we’re kind of screwed. We’re not in a good place. If we can’t, you know, we need to scale CDR to have any chance of getting to gigatonne scale.
So like, you know, hopefully these numbers will be achievable. There’s more I can say, but like, I want to focus on what you want to talk about.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, well, I want to bring Chris into the conversation and kind of get your perspective on using government procurement as a way to grow an industry.
Chris Barnard: Hey, well, for once, I’m not the one talking the most on this podcast, which is honestly great for me because I like listening and that was really interesting. So we thank you for that. I think kind of the interesting thing about government procurement typically kind from a conservative perspective is that the most important thing in a market obviously is competition. And when a government chooses projects without real competition in terms of the projects it chooses, that’s where real problems start to emerge. And the kind of interesting thing here, as Toby mentioned, is it’s based on this reverse auction system.
And if you look at the UK, they did that for their offshore wind industry to huge success. And it’s actually a very market-based way of doing it because it drove down the cost of wind because you’re kind of basically forcing... suppliers to compete for what they’re willing to provide this project at the for the lowest price that the government will be willing to pay for and that they will be willing to do the project for. And so that’s actually actually a pretty market based sensible way of going about it. And so honestly, I’m not that opposed to that idea.
I think the one question to kind of consider is obviously technological carbon dioxide removal is a lot more expensive than natural CDR and There’s a question to be had about what is serving taxpayers the most with the money that the government has. Is it the technological kind of route with the promise that in the long run, you will be able to bring that price down enough to be competitive? Or is it really just trying to reduce emissions as quickly as possible with the adaptation benefits that natural climate solutions have as well, like being able to withstand storms and reduce flooding and all that kind of stuff.
And so I think there’s a valid question to be had there, but Insofar as a way of doing government procurement, I don’t think this is a bad policy.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Chris, you were going exactly where my brain went for, obviously, Nori does nature-based, soil-based carbon removal. And so I was wondering, Toby, I know open air is about durability and all about longer term permanence, but how did you balance what I think are somewhat competing interests of taxpayer dollars spending more for more durable carbon removal versus maybe spending less for current carbon removal and also allowing that money maybe to be used in other environmentally for other types of environmental mitigation.
Toby Bryce: Yeah. I mean, these are great questions. And Chris, I really appreciate your perspective on this because thank you for liking our reverse mechanism. I mean, there’s a lot to say. First of all, we try to stay away from the nature-based versus engineered distinction and really focus on the characteristics of the specific CDR pathway. Again, you know, additionality, durability, verification, and equity. One, I think, key point is basically every quote-unquote engineered CDR pathway is nature-based. It’s based on some sort of natural process, whether it’s a mineralization or what have you. So like, you know, and pretty much everything except a very like Naturalistic planning of a tree is engineered on some level.
And it’s actually, you know, it’s quote unquote technology of like humans planting that tree. So, so like, I think it’s really important to focus on the characteristic of the specific CDR pathway as opposed to the, the sort of Commonly applied labels. In terms of the durability, we feel like just there’s a really gap in the solution set for durable carbon removal. I think that the nature-based solutions, sorry, I just did it. But forest reforestation, afforestation, regenerative agriculture are obviously all super important for a variety of reasons. They also deliver all sorts of non-tonne measured ecosystem services and other benefits.
So I think that personally, there are other policies that We just think there’s a gap on the durable side. And we had a lot of people who wanted us to do a thousand year floor on the durability. And that would really, you know, limit the potential solutions. We have a very robust agricultural sector. We have a very robust wood product sector. And so we wanted to also provide an opportunity for solutions like biochar. General pathway, but enhanced rock weathering using quote unquote rock dust ground up the salt as a soil amendment, which is a soil based solution, which can benefit farmers and as Nori Wells knows farmers conveniently have ways to spread powder on their fields already built so like you know there’s an existing delivery mechanism that we think has a lot of scale potential.
So we wanted the policy to be able to accommodate those. And so like we, again, we just really tried to focus on creating a standards-based policy that’s not picking winners. And it’s just letting the market and let innovation and let competition and let science deliver the best results. And I’m all for, and I, you know, we need to be doing more, spending more. I’m all for a policy to incent, you know, um, uh, uh, Aforestation and reforestation and also the preservation of existing forests. But most of those things, well, avoided deforestation doesn’t balance out a tonne of emitted CO2.
So we really wanted to focus on pure removals that are going to balance tonnes of emitted CO2.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Chris, can you imagine a type of legislation like this gaining traction in the federal government? Has it got enough of a free market spin that Republicans would feel comfortable with it.
Chris Barnard: So here’s my pitch, and thanks for bringing that up. I approach this from a philosophical perspective that may be slightly different from the average conservative slash Republican. My view is that when it comes to climate change and carbon emissions, we expect individuals and private companies to be held accountable for their emissions, right? I don’t think the government is any different. I think the government acts as an actor within the broad market space. And so I think that the government’s own emissions related to its activities and I’d want the government to have fewer activities and it does.
But insofar as it does have activities, those should be taken into account because there is a social cost of carbon. And so I do think it makes sense for the government to actively compete within the carbon market, we’ll use that term, to most cost effectively offset the emissions that it produces insofar as it can reduce them by actually like procuring energy from clean energy projects or whatever it might be. I, for example, with the Growing Climate Solutions Act, which we’ve talked about on this podcast, I think establishing a carbon market like that with the standards and all that, and the government being a part of the carbon market in terms of a buyer would actually provide huge impetus for these types of markets around the country.
And so I Presumably the GCSA will be passing this year. And I’d love to see some kind of follow up where the government actually starts to buy those kinds of offsets itself and helping incentivize it that way, which I think would be would be really, really good, broadly speaking, for this for this space.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Do you see a place where you can make a convincing argument that spending $350 a tonne by the federal government is a good thing in the carbon removal space? I mean, I know your personal belief system, but for I would imagine people in northern New York state potentially for the population up there, potentially populations in the south. It’s a hard pill to swallow like that we’re doing carbon because they don’t necessarily fully buy into climate change and that stuff. So how do you make the argument to people like that?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I think it is obviously on the expensive side, especially compared to specific natural solutions. And so I think it’d be hard to justify from that perspective if it’s Kind of a blanket offset all emissions. If it’s like a specific program intended to like enhance innovation and you tie it with Potential innovation, R&D and that kind of stuff, then you might have a good case for it. But I think in general, it would be economic suicide for the federal government to offset all of its emissions at $350 a tonne. And that’s where participating in a carbon market like GCSA would create and paying for things like tree planting and soil-based sequestration, I think would be obviously more financially effective.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, Toby, so sort of the same question for you. I know you said you’re before a committee today and within the New York State Assembly, and I’m assuming there were some maybe doubters of, maybe not doubters of carbon removal, but maybe doubters of climate change on that panel. So what is your argument to them if they, or do they make this argument to you that we don’t want to spend this much money, you know?
Toby Bryce: Yeah, so I... There were no doubters of climate change, thankfully, that we were talking here. One point on the federal, there are a couple of bills pending that they’re not published yet, and I’m not maybe at liberty to say who the legislators are who are going to be introducing them, but there are a couple of federal CDR procurement bills out there that are, I think, that will see the world soon. And one of them is based on scaling up to balance federal government. Emissions as they are measured. And one thing about cost, all of these bills, the New York bill, we’re starting at, I can’t do this math in my head, but like 100,000 over 61.
5 million were, you know, whatever that is, 0. 1%-ish of the overall 2050 target. So we’re starting very small. And the price tag in 2025 is $35 million, which to you and to us chickens is a lot of money, but like to the state like New York that has a budget of a couple hundred billion dollars, it’s actually not that much money. And so I think there is a climate necessity to do this. Like one question that a state legislator in New York might reasonably have is why should New York do this?
And I do think there is an ethic of the state I mean, this is a waste management issue, and we should all be cleaning up this trash that we’ve been putting in the sky for over 100 years as via a negative externality of the sort of legacy fossil economy. But there are also a lot of other industrial developments. The CDRLA is not an innovation or a research and development policy. We can always use more, but there’s quite a bit of money out there for research and development and innovation. This is a policy to help markets scale, and markets need help scaling at an early stage, particularly a market like this where all the buyers are volunteers, because we do not have an effective compliance market yet.
We do not have a price on carbon. And so the purpose of the legislation is to scale the markets and invest a little bit now so that we can get down the cost curve. I mean, I’m sure all of you are familiar with all the different research out there. You know, there’s a great paper by Habiba Zarabadi and Klaus Lochner out of Arizona State University about buying down the path of the cost of direct air capture. And with an aggregate spend of like an order of a billion dollars is what they estimate would take to like get this single CDR pathway to sort of that hundred dollar level.
And the earth shots that the DOE is doing for carbon removal, again, at $100. I mean, these things all together, I think, are going to help get us there. But they say the states are the laboratories of democracy. We’re also the laboratories for this kind of policy. And so I think it’s really important to be innovating at a state level on this kind of policy. But the policy can both scale across states, but also can be a model for adoption at larger federal scales.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So one kind of twist on the question of cost is You know, what if 350 isn’t enough, right? I mean, we’re seeing like the Stripes, the Shopify’s, the Microsoft’s paying a lot more for probably similar supply as what New York would want. Quality, durable. I won’t use nature, but I don’t know what the right word is, but you know what we’re talking about, deep sea, that kind of stuff. So what happens if New York can’t compete at this price? What’s the alternative?
Toby Bryce: Yeah. Well, there’s a mechanism in the legislation for the money to roll over if you can’t make enough qualified purchases year on year. So they just won’t spend the money. I believe, and I won’t be able to prove this to you on this podcast, but I believe that with a 10-year delivery period in 2025, with an average maximum of $350, that the procurement will be achievable. I also think it’s likely that the bill is going to shrink in its monetary size through the legislative process based on feedback that we’ve gotten.
The 100,000 starting point and we’re doubling year on year for the first five year authorization of the bill. That’s like our opening bid and we’re getting feedback and we’re going to have a revision of the bill probably in early March. And we can definitely scale it back. To me, the most important thing is to pass something that gets the public sector Buying funding, however you want to phrase it, durable carbon removal as part of climate policy, in New York’s case as part of a net zero climate policy. And again, that 350 is an average.
So if you do buy the government in New York, it will be the Department of Environmental Conservation can buy some more expensive pathways, but they have to be balanced out with some lower cost pathways. So like biochar, there’s tonnes of biochar innovation happening in New York. And biochar is like, you know, not 350, maybe it’s 100. And maybe, you know, there is a durability question of biochar, depending on how you, you know, biochar is a soil amendment. There’s some questions about whether it would meet the 100 year durability threshold, but there are other things you can do with biochar that would.
So you’re basically just going to have to balance. And there’s nothing in the bill that says a forestry project couldn’t win a bid. It just has to demonstrate to the department’s satisfaction that it offers 100-year durability.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, isn’t that the tough nut, which I won’t go down the path of verification and monitoring because that could be a whole other two-hour conversation. But Chris, so curious from your perspective and instinct, How bills like this could scale across the country? And what types of things would you tell open air to think about as they’re thinking about places in the South or other areas of the country that might be less open or don’t have net zero goals like New York?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I think it’s a really good question. And when you’re looking at states like Texas being a very good example, Where kind of some of the some of the members who are leading someone into climate change, like, for example, Dan Crenshaw, but he’ll be in it from a distinct like oil and gas perspective saying we carbon capture and storage to make sure that we keep the economic benefits, but also like protect the planet, etc, etc. So I would say that you have to sell it as a benefit to their economies.
And in the case of Texas, especially, and this goes for most kind of like fossil fuel producing states, they’re really worried about what all this clean energy stuff is going to do to their core industries. And they’re really hoping that carbon capture is kind of their silver bullet. Um, to prevent their, like their economies from kind of losing this huge chunk. Um, I think it’s like similar reason why Exxon is pouring like millions, if not billions into research on this and all that kind of stuff. And it’s really kind of their go-to.
So I would say trying to sell it as a benefit that if this innovation really takes off, it’s the single best way for their States to continue their energy production, um, but without kind of the, the climate, um, Negative impacts of it and all that. So I think that’s really kind of the way to approach it. But I think even with that, it’s probably a pretty big list.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. Do you think that legislatures in states like Texas would buy into developing nascent industries rather than trying to save old industries, building on new technologies, creating new opportunities? Or is that a bridge too far when you’ve got a huge oil and gas economy?
Chris Barnard: Potentially. I mean, it depends if those industries would be Texas-based industries. I mean, this is the way kind of states think and especially state legislatures. They’re thinking about this from like how it benefits their specific state. So if Texas is like offering these opportunities and all the companies with these nascent technologies are non-Texas-based, what’s the point for Texas, right? So if there’s companies within Texas that could like create new jobs there, could leverage this innovation in the state, Then potentially, but you have to kind of really almost make that patriotic state argument.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And then Toby, I think that’s what you guys are trying to do, right? You’re trying to really hook into the, at least in this bill, the New York infrastructure around CBR. Yeah.
Toby Bryce: Absolutely. And we’re going to try Texas, too, actually. Texas is about to release a group at University of Texas. You guys are probably familiar with the California Getting to Neutral report that was produced out of Lawrence Livermore National Lab a few years ago, which was basically assessing all of the scale potential CDR pathways in California to get them to a notional 125 million tonne annual removal goal. And Texas is producing a report like that. And Texas has some unique things going on. I mean, they’re trying to win these DAC hubs.
They’re trying to, a lot of the incumbent oil and gas, fossil gas companies, fossil carbon companies are buying up leases in the Gulf to sequester CO2. And so, like, there’s a lot of opportunity there. So Texas has a big, Houston is a huge center for, you know, obviously the incumbent or legacy. So like there is this industrial development opportunity and Chris is exactly I think aligned with the way we think about it and that’s what you have to hook into in a state like Texas. Which where we haven’t started, but in Arizona, we have obviously a reddish purple state, but definitely red at the state level.
And that’s what you have to hook into in a state like Texas, which is where we haven’t started, but in Arizona, we have obviously a reddish purple state, but definitely red at the state level. You know, you’d think not great prospect, but Arizona State University is there and one of the most famous direct air capture inventors in the world, Klaus Lackner, is at Arizona State University. They have a very robust center for negative carbon emissions there that’s doing all sorts of great research. And I’m not sure if it’s a local legislator there, but there is a Republican legislator there who thinks this technology is super cool.
So like we’re leaning into that piece of it and it would be more of an innovation and like an industrial development policy purely in Arizona with less highlighting of the climate benefit that you might do in a net zero state. But I think the larger point is that we are intending it as an adaptable policy framework and we really think that A successful policy has to reflect both the legislative context of each state, but also the political context, the social context, and also to a certain extent sort of the scientific geological context, like what CDR pathways make sense.
So maybe a policy, and we were working in the Pacific Northwest, and a policy in the Pacific Northwest needs to figure out how to leverage and benefit the forestry industry, for example. So like, I think you just really need to like go state by state and think about what’s going to be important for that state. The other thing is you need people. So like our group, we’re trying to like, you know, there’s tonnes of work to be done. And I would say also, it’s pretty fun. It’s like super interesting. You learn a lot every day.
And we’re just trying to get citizen advocate groups in as many states as possible who are interested in kind of like pioneering this idea and seeing what they can do with it in each state.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. As we have been talking about a lot in the show generally, carbon removal is taking off. There’s a lot, obviously, of conversations around net zero approaches. So if governments don’t step in to regulate the market at an early stage, what do you think will happen? And so Toby, I’ll start with you. And then Chris, maybe you’ll just deny the premise of the question that the government should regulate markets. I don’t know, but we’ll get to you seconds.
Toby Bryce: Well, I mean, are you, Roy, regulate markets? So you’re saying no government procurement policy like CDRLA, no pricing carbon?
Radhika Moolgavkar: If we don’t get legislation passed of some sort to either regulate the carbon markets through what would be more traditional mechanisms like what has happened in California or potentially like procurement where at least the government is involved, what do you see happening to the carbon markets in like the next 10 to 15 years if it’s strictly voluntary? No government.
Toby Bryce: They’ll stay small. I mean, like, you know, we’re not going to get to gigatonscale.
Radhika Moolgavkar: What about you, Chris?
Chris Barnard: I’m going to just add one thing that I wanted to say earlier, but I forgot about, actually. I think one of the big issues, and there’s a really interesting article in the Hill I read earlier today about how all these climate policies won’t really matter much if we don’t do something about the permitting process around them. And I think in particular for carbon capture projects, there’s a lot of issues in terms of the permitting and kind of the regulations around it. And it’s just very convoluted and it’s a huge drag on innovation and on kind of the industry scaling in the market.
And so I would say there’s very much kind of like a market-based answer there saying like, well, there’s a lot of things the government’s already throwing in the way of these projects. And like one stat was that 42% of energy projects currently backlogged under the National Environmental Policy Act are clean energy projects and only 15% are fossil fuels. And so it’s kind of paradoxical that these environmental regulations are the ones holding back these clean energy projects. And so I think There is appetite in the market to do these kinds of carbon capture projects.
And you kind of see that with some of the investment that’s happening and like Elon Musk, like his funding and all that. I think one of the biggest things we can do is actually make it easier for them to actually do that. And then I’m not at all against kind of ideas like these auctions and R&D and all that kind of stuff to help leverage these nascent technologies. But I think even if you throw billions of dollars at it, it’s not going to do much if it takes five years for every project.
Application to be processed by the government.
Toby Bryce: And I think that’s definitely an area of potential bipartisan agreement. And in fact, my policy center, sorry, they are working on this and like John Fishman from there, just like wrote a big, great piece about this recently. And it really is something that’s holding back, not just carbon removal, but deployable renewables and particularly transmission. I mean, and a lot of times it’s the, Left that’s doing the NIMBYism that is keeping some of these projects from going. So like, you know, there’s plenty of blame to go around on that front.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s the unsexy part of being an environmental advocate, right? Like the permitting, the going to the government, asking permission. Nobody really wants to talk about it because really it makes people fall asleep. So your constituents aren’t out there going, yes, please make it this easier. But anyway, with that, because I think it’s kind of nice to end on a note of agreement, not that there was too much debate today, but still, I think we all agree that the permitting process is a place where anybody and everybody could focus. Chris, can you give us a little good news before we end the show?
Chris Barnard: Well, you know, with me, everything always somehow comes back to nuclear energy, so...
Radhika Moolgavkar: Or Texas, or the Texas grid.
Chris Barnard: Or Texas, yeah. I’ll give you two different... pieces of good news related to the to the topic. The first one is that West Virginia officially repealed its ban on nuclear energy projects. So I think that’ll be really interesting to see how the state can attract potentially some advanced nuclear reactors to retrofit on their coal plants that might be closing. So I think that’s a really interesting one. And then a second bit of good news, which is also personal, is Colorado, there’s a bill in Colorado that’s being introduced to have the state enact a study on the potential of small modular reactors in the state.
And Colorado has no nuclear right now, so they could open the possibility of having nuclear. And I’m actually testifying in favor at the Colorado Senate next week. So that’s another piece of good news.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. West Coast swing for Chris. Yep. All right. Well, thank you both for joining me today, Toby. It was great to have you. And anybody who’s listening, I can’t imagine you haven’t heard of it, but he’s at Open Air Collective. He was just talking about how they could use lots more citizens to help them pass some of these bills. So if you have any interest, go to their website and I’m sure you can find out more. With that, have a wonderful weekend and thank you both for being here today. Take care.
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