Back to the (carbon-removing) Future

relaunching Everything and the Carbon Sink to explore the next frontier of carbon removal

Hop in your time machine, and travel back to the UC Berkeley campus in 2013. There you might find me, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed MBA student, trying to talk to anyone and everyone that I could that was also thinking about big ideas for the future of clean energy that could make a real dent in our fight against climate change.

At some point in those conversations, I stumbled across early research papers about this thing called carbon removal. Of course we don’t have an actual time machine, so traveling back in time to stop power plants, cars, factories, forests, and farms from emitting the carbon that they already had emitted wasn’t possible. But this research suggested that, if we could figure out how to scale carbon removal technologies, markets, and policies over the coming decades, we wouldn’t need science fiction to clean up carbon emissions from the past. Which meant we wouldn’t need science fiction to make a safe and sustainable climate for generations to come.

As far as big ideas for the future of clean energy that could make a real dent in our fight against climate change go, carbon removal fit the bill. I got hooked, and I spent as much of my time as I could thinking about what a career building a carbon-removing economy of the future could look like.

Get back in your time machine and travel a year forward into the internet of 2014. There you might find my first foray into writing about carbon removal publicly, the blog Everything and the Carbon Sink. At the time, there was almost no coverage of activity explicitly talking about carbon removal outside of a few niche communities of climate change academics. What news of carbon removal business activity or government policy I did find took a decent amount of work, so I thought that sharing lots of related stories and my (mostly half-baked) takes on relevant climate stories might be useful for other fellow travelers out there. At a minimum, it would help me hone my own thinking about what to do next for my career in carbon removal.

Now travel forward in time to wherever you find yourself today. The landscape on carbon removal looks totally transformed. Hundreds of carbon removal startups have sold millions of tons removals credits to voluntary corporate purchasers; those credits are supporting dozens of commercial scale projects come to life with the help of billions of dollars in government policy support. The field is now covered by a cadre of excellent journalists, social media mavens, podcasters, books aimed at a more general audiences, NGO reports aimed at policymakers, and even the occasional primetime news coverage.

Yet a big gap in the coverage of carbon removal still exists. To see this gap more clearly, travel forward a few decades to a future where we’ve nearly eliminated carbon emissions globally, and are removing tens of billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year (that is, we are cleaning up a good chunk of the roughly 50 billion tons of greenhouse gasses we emit each year now).

In this future, many of our farms and forests will remove carbon from the air. So will our power grid, factories and mines, water and waste utilities, and our long distance transportation sector. Ocean conservation efforts will remove carbon, as will climate adaptation and resilience efforts. But these efforts won’t do carbon removal, per se. They will do farming, or mining, or desalination, etc. much like they do today. Only instead of generating emissions to the atmosphere, they will do the opposite: cleaning up carbon and storing it back in the ground from whence it came. In other words, in this future we will think of carbon removal as an outcome, rather than as a tactic like we primarily discuss it today.

In many ways, this distant possible future looks more like the more distant actual past. If you were to get in your time machine and travel back to the climate conversation of the 1990s and 2000s, the seeds of a carbon removal economy of the future were already present, just not discussed as such. Climate scientific bodies like the IPCC have always defined “mitigation” as both reduction and removals of greenhouse gas emissions, and national inventories of carbon emissions have long been accompanied by inventories of carbon sinks. Carbon removal solutions like reforestation and agricultural practices that store carbon have been around for millennia, and have been conceived as climate solutions from the beginning of the climate solutions conversation. Bioenergy projects with carbon capture and storage, an early darling of the carbon removal modeling community, have now been operational at commercial scale for decades.

Few if any of these early activities were likely truly carbon-negative under robust and comprehensive carbon accounting frameworks. But that mattered less in a world where emissions were going up, not down. The key at that time was to build the components of a carbon removing economy of the future while reducing emissions as much as possible, not assemble it all together into a fully carbon-negative package if doing so was too expensive or otherwise impractical.

Travel one last time back into the present. Now that many pieces of this carbon removal puzzle have started to emerge, it is time to begin in earnest to assemble them into a carbon removal economy of the future. Many NGOs have already started exploring how we can embed carbon removal more effectively into industrial and agricultural business models and policies. I think this is a great but incomplete start.

If carbon removal is going to be embedded in large swaths of the global economy in a few decades, we will need to think more today about how carbon removal intersects with, well, large swaths of the global economy. How central bankers, national budget offices, labor leaders, and financial regulators think about a carbon removing economy of the future is as important as how climate and energy research and innovation funders in governments, venture capital, and corporate sustainability departments think about it. The same goes for leaders thinking about the future of national security, democracy reform and coalition building, international development, education, public health, and beyond.

Cast in this new framing, the carbon removal conversation quickly starts to feel as amorphous, uncharted, and opaque as the conversation on carbon removal was a decade ago. That’s why I’m rebooting Everything and the Carbon Sink here. In short, plan to use the blog to explore carbon removal beyond carbon removal. The content will remain messy and unfocused (though I promise that there will be fewer stories this time around about how things like whale poop could be carbon removal), but hopefully I can maintain a similar breadth of curiosity to the first incarnation of the blog.

Selfishly, I hope this blog will continue to help me hone my own thinking about what to do next for my career in carbon removal. But I also hope it is useful well beyond that, specifically to those people who may feel as far outside of the current “carbon removal” community as I felt a decade ago, but who have become as ensorcelled as I was (and remain) about the potential for carbon removal to inject hope into the conversation on climate change, and opportunity to transform our planet and society for the better for generations to become.

Thanks to all who have pushed me to do this, and to all who engage in the conversation going forward.