Burying our Carbon in the Ground, or Our Heads in the Sand?

On carbon dioxide removal, marching for the climate, and California in the eye of the storm

Dear friends,

Seven years ago, while touring a Northern California ranch with group of other people interested carbon farming, I had an important shift in my understanding of carbon.

Someone from the Marin Carbon Project—a collaborative effort that conducts research into how compost applications and managed grazing impact the way soil stores carbon—scrawled a super basic, poorly executed chart of the carbon cycle on a piece of butcher paper. They mapped out the way carbon moves—and gets stored—in the atmosphere, in the ocean, in biomass like plants and trees, in the soil, and deep down in the rocks below the soil at the fossil level. They explained, in reductive terms, that the reason so much carbon is now in the atmosphere and in the ocean—where it’s wreaking havoc and causing unprecedented warming—is because the cycle is out of balance, and there’s now less carbon cycling through trees and plants, and less carbon stored at the soil and rock level.

In other words climate change isn’t caused by an overall increase of carbon in the system, but by an imbalance in the carbon cycle. I felt a little embarrassed to be fully grasping this fact so late in life, but since then I’ve also been surprised by how little that framing is discussed.

The carbon cycle has been on my mind a lot recently, as I’ve been thinking about carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and the new industry that has sprung up around direct air capture (DAC). I am clearly not an expert on any of this, but I’ve been drawn to understand it better.

For starters, experts agree that we’re going to need to remove some carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere no matter how quickly we cut back on fossil fuel emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that there’s no way to stay within the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming target, or anywhere near it, if we don’t also remove some of the existing carbon from the atmosphere. Even if we stopped emitting today, we would still see significant warming and climate disruption based on what we’ve already done.

So it’s how we remove or draw down the carbon out of the atmosphere that’s in question.

Unlike “nature-based” solutions, which involve absorbing more carbon back into trees, plants, and soil, direct air capture (DAC) was designed to take place in large facilities that use fans to pull in air, move it through a filter, capture CO2, and inject it deep underground, turning it into rock or using it to create building materials like cement. (Some are also talking about using it to carbonate soda.)

Just a few years ago, DAC was widely agreed to be a pipe dream, mainly because it was cost prohibitive. But the price is gradually going down, and suddenly DAC is being cast as an inevitable part of the effort to get to net zero. In August, the Biden administration announced that it has invested 1.2 billion in the creation of two carbon-capture facilities, one in West Texas and another in Louisiana, and it is also funding the planning of more hubs in California, Alaska, and Alabama.

Who’s building these hubs? So far, all these tax are dollars are going oil companies. Occidental, the company behind the Texas hub, is literally planning to build it in the middle of an existing oil field.

At an industry conference in March, Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s CEO, described the move as a way to stay in business as an oil and gas producer. “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” said Hollub. “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.” It’s not clear whether the industry actually sees DAC as replacing their existing business model or simply adding to it, in a way that is strikingly similar to the oil and gas industry’s promised expansion in the renewable energy space—a promise that has yet to transpire in any meaningful way.

When the Biden administration announced the recent funding, it promised to “ensure meaningful community and labor engagement” and contribute to the President’s environmental justice initiative. But a coalition of environmental justice groups have pushed back, making it clear in a recent letter that they do not see handing the funds to oil companies as any form of justice, and pointedly recommending that the administration rescind the offers.

Writing in the New Republic, Kate Aranoff noted that, “As of now, almost all of the carbon captured in the U.S. is injected into depleted oil wells to unearth more fossil fuels through a process known as enhanced oil recovery.” That raises multiple red flags, even if the new hubs have been explicitly barred from doing enhanced oil recovery with the funds.

As Robinson Meyer wrote in Heatmap recently, “The infrastructure and the expertise best-suited for carbon removal is largely in the same places that have fossil-fuel industries today. (Think of the Gulf Coast or North Dakota.)” But he adds: “Some people who live in those places want to see decarbonization end the fossil-fuel industry forever—not transform it into something different, like a carbon management industry.”

Each direct air capture hub must be able to remove at least 1 million tons of CO2 per year—a number that is so proportionally small it prompts me to ask: Where exactly are the emperor’s clothes?

David T. Ho, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who studies the climate’s impacts on the ocean, is asking similar questions. In a recent essay in Nature, he likened carbon dioxide removal as a time machine and wrote: “In 2022, the world emitted 40.5 billion tonnes of CO2. At that rate, for every year of operation at its full potential, each hub would take the atmosphere back in time by almost 13 minutes … if everyone on Earth planted a tree—8 billion trees—it would take us back in time by about 43 hours every year, once the trees had matured.”

Jonathan Foley, executive director of the climate education nonprofit Project Drawdown, also came out against the hubs, writing: “Carbon capture is still far too clunky and expensive—costing thousands of dollars per ton—to put on the taxpayer’s dime. By comparison, cutting emissions through energy efficiency or renewable energy is far cheaper, and saves taxpayers money in the long run. Instead of billion-dollar Big Oil boondoggles, the government should invest in proven climate solutions while funding smaller, more innovative R&D projects that explore cheaper, scalable ways to capture carbon.”

Foley, Ho, and others see a role for DAC, but for the most part they see that role as coming after the world stops emitting fossil fuels. “We must stop talking about deploying CDR as a solution today, when emissions remain high—as if it somehow replaces radical, immediate emission cuts,” said Ho.

The long-term plan for paying for DAC appears to be the carbon offset markets—which are inherently designed to let big companies buy their way out of ending their own pollution. Indeed, the danger with all carbon dioxide removal is that it can distract, and potentially excuse, our leaders from putting an end to the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Nature-based solutions, which involve working with the carbon cycle to bring it back into balance, make so much more intuitive sense to me than burying something in the ground and expecting it to stop being a problem. We’ve tried that with a great deal of our waste—including nuclear waste—and it’s not going well for the people, waterways, plants, and animals living nearby.

And while recent, devastating changes to the Canada’s boreal forests and the Amazon are a major blow to the possibility of drawing carbon out of the atmosphere naturally, I still believe that it’s not too late to work with nature in more responsive, more educated, more intentional ways. In part because doing so will also help us weather the effects of droughts, floods, fires, and other results of climate change.

One of the Biden Administration’s largest investments in nature-based carbon removal is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities, another multibillion dollar program. Not unlike this DCA effort, it’s funding a number of large corporate ag players including Cargill and the American Corn Growers Association. But it’s also funding academic institutions, and small and midsized nonprofits like PASA, which are actually working with small and midscale farms on the ground, helping them do everything from integrating trees into agriculture to applying compost at a massive scale to—some very promising, scalable solutions to pulling more carbon out of the atmosphere and drawing it into the plants and soil.

I’d vote for much more investment in those efforts, alongside policies that do a better job of preserving what remains of the large tree forests, prairies, and peatlands that are still holding massive quantities of carbon—since doing so is much more effective than destroying it and starting over again.

For a little levity, I recommend this fake ad satirizing Australia’s efforts at CDR.

Climate news you may have missed

Emma Cassidy | Survival Media Agency

Marching with your family

People are hitting the streets all over the country this week as leaders from around the world prepare to gather today at the United Nations headquarters in New York for the Climate Ambition Summit, where the U.N. Secretary-General will push for an accelerated move from emissions-producing fossil fuels to renewable energy.

An estimated 75,000 people turned out in New York on Sunday, including young people, Indigenous folks, and a number of groups drawing connections between the climate and workers’ rights. Protests are likely to continue there all week; Monday saw a group of people get arrested for attempting to block the entrance to the Federal Reserve and Tuesday a group marched to the Bank of America headquarters to protest its fossil fuel funding

On Sunday I took the train to Sacramento with my nine-year-old, my sister, and her sons, and we marched in solidarity with the New York crowd with around 500 people. I couldn’t help but wonder whether our kids will feel compelled to join the youth climate movement in the coming years.

I was reminded of this piece in Teen Vogue, coauthored by a pair of mother-daughter climate activists, that explores similar territory, and implores more parents of young activists to show up alongside—or, realistically, a little bit behind—their teenagers when they take to the streets:

Although the two of us do most of our climate organizing separately (what teenager wants their mom hovering as they plan a protest?), our whole family has attended Fridays for Future’s twice-annual strikes for the past couple of years. Helen is always at the front of the march, leading the way with her fellow Fridays activists. Mom and dad walk somewhere in the middle with her two sisters and whichever other family members and friends they’ve been able to corral. We find each other at the end to hug and check in. But when we look around, we don’t see other families doing the same. In fact, we see very few parents at all. We look at all the passionate New York City high school students striking for a liveable future and ask ourselves, where are their parents? Their grandparents? Where are their teachers, their coaches, all the adults who love them?

Decades of coordinated response to climate activism

The Atlas Network is a global network of oil- and gas-funded think tanks that have spent years disseminating “public rhetoric vilifying climate activists, which the media then picks up and amplifies and, ultimately, leads to the criminalization of those activists,” according to new research from the journalists behind the outlets Drilled and DeSmog. The pattern is playing out around the globe, and its leading to harsh penalties and increasingly violent responses to age-old antiviolent tactics like blocking traffic. The New Republic published a deep dive into the strategies behind the network, and its growing reach.

According to journalists Amy Westervelt and Geoff Dembicki, these thinktanks “have always painted environmentalists and the regulations they seek to place on polluting industries as a cancerous growth on society,” often lifting messaging about “extremism” and “terrorism” directly out of fascist handbooks and going so far as to brand Indigenous-led environmental protests as led by an “outside agitator.” It’s illuminating, if frightening, to see a light shined on these dangerous mechanisms. And the push by these groups to brand activists as outsiders fits with the kind of opposite-speak we’ve come to expect from conservative, industry-funded communications campaigns, especially when you consider that some of us see those working to know, protect, and fight for the earth as the ultimate insiders.

California at the center of the fossil fuel fight

It would have been nice if lawmakers in the fifth largest economy in the world had stepped up to respond to the impacts of climate change more directly before it became such an out-and-out crisis, but their actions this month are still incredibly important.

Last week, California announced a major lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute (API) for “allegedly engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception and creating statewide climate change–related harms” in the state. The suit marks “the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court,” said Attorney General Rob Bonta in a press release. The goals include the creation of a “fund to finance climate mitigation and adaptation efforts; injunctive relief to both protect California’s natural resources from pollution, impairment, and destruction as well as to prevent the companies from making any further false or misleading statements about the contribution of fossil fuel combustion to climate change.” According to the LA Times, five California cities—San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond, and Imperial Beach—as well as the counties of San Mateo, Marin, and Santa Cruz, have all also filed climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies.

Meanwhile, the state’s legislature has also been hard at work on a “groundbreaking” effort to require large U.S.–based companies doing business in California with over a billion in annual revenue (estimated 5,400 companies!) to publicly disclose their annual greenhouse gas emissions. State lawmakers passed the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act on September 11 and Governor Gavin Newsom has until October 14 to sign the bill. If he does, companies will be on the hook to disclose the indirect, and often significant, emissions linked to their supply chains.

On the brighter side

1. Despite recurring messages that electric heat pumps don’t work in cold places, a new study out of Europe that gathered data from a range of places, including Maine and Norway, found evidence to the contrary. “The team found that heat pumps surpass fossil and electric-resistance systems in efficiency—including at temperatures that define, for many Europeans, ​“the coldest days of the year,” the study’s coauthor told Canary Media.

2. After years of campaigning from students, New York University announced it will divest from fossil fuel companies and responded directly to the campus Sunrise Movement representatives. The school’s endowment totals over $5 billion and the move makes it one of over 250 institutions that have divested from fossil fuels. 

3. This week, young activists like Xiye Bastida have been speaking up and drawing connections between addressing the climate crisis and maintaining peaceful societies. In the wake of these efforts, I found it heartening to learn that 30 percent of Swiss residents surveyed said they had made changes to their transportation, buying, and recycling habits after hearing repeatedly from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement. Just five years into the effort, it makes me wonder what the next five years will yield.

4. Speaking of young people in the spotlight, I was impressed by rising tennis star Coco Gauff’s graceful response to the fact that climate protests briefly shut down her match at the U.S. Open earlier this month: “I believe in climate change. I don’t know exactly what they were protesting [but] I 100% believe there are things we could do better.”

5. U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, launched an ambitious project with the Library of Congress to bring poetry to the National Parks and collect an anthology of poems. “Never has it been more urgent to feel a sense of reciprocity with our environment, and poetry’s alchemical mix of attention, silence, and rhythm gives us a reciprocal way of experiencing nature—of communing with the natural world through breath and presence,” said Limón about the project. (I recommend the poem “Salvage,” which Limón wrote for novelist Lauren Groff’s Climate Visionaries Artists’ Project.)

Take care and stay safe,

Twilight

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