Carbon Dioxide Removal Getting Boring Is A Good Sign

It is generally agreed that as the globe stumbles its way toward a net-zero economy, hopefully arriving there in the general ballpark of the middle of this century, simply cutting emissions will not be enough. The climate system is enormous and is plagued by significant inertia, meaning all the carbon dioxide we’ve sent skyward will remain up there and keep acting like a warm blanket, continuing the catastrophic impacts we already see unfolding today — until we start removing it at scale.

Carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, takes a lot of forms — tree planting and forest management, improved agricultural practices, “enhanced weathering” where various rocks interact with greenhouses gases, and yes, direct air capture (DAC), where we build machines capable of simply pulling it out of the air. In each case, a fundamental challenge is establishing that what we think and hope is happening is actually happening: is the CO2 actually staying out of the atmosphere?

Much like with emissions themselves, keeping track of this is not a straightforward process. “CDR pathways are diverse in their approaches and levels of maturity,” wrote dozens of industry representatives, researchers, and others in the field, in an open letter about the need to standardize removal assessments in 2023. “A similar diversity of scientific approaches to verification will be needed to quantify key climate outcomes.”

The group recommended establishing an “independent, not-for-profit initiative” that would work to quantify CDR efforts while not relying on funding that depends on buying or selling carbon credits — in other words, a body without a stake in the success or failure of any given project. Enter CRSI, or the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative, launched formally on Tuesday. The Initiative will build various tools to track and quantify CDR projects of all kinds, and will offer technical assistance to the NGOs, governments, and others who are trying to build a robust system that will actually result in tangible climate benefits.

This is, fundamentally, boring as hell.

For example, one of CRSI’s first projects is as follows: “Building the technical foundation and policy framework for jurisdiction-level monitoring of enhanced weathering on agricultural lands.” Okay. They also have built a Quantification Resources Database, based on work on something called the Carbon Reservoir and Flux Framework, of which “[w]e stress-tested the framework by mapping different commercial carbon removal solutions to the reservoirs and fluxes contained in our model.” Mm-hmm. Yes.

In this realm, boring is good.

Part of the problem with climate solutions work is that people tend to get waylaid by the fantastical, by solar geoengineering or nuclear fusion, and ignore the practical and mundane. With CDR, there is still plenty of room for significant technological wizardry — DAC still costs somewhere north of $500 per ton, a number that will need to be slashed to pieces through innovation or government subsidy if it will ever power up toward the gigaton scale — but at root it all needs to actually add up to something real. We need to know that any given project does what it says in order to spread effort and dollars properly. That’s boring, critical work, and at least at first glance CRSI seems like a decent start.

“Ultimately, we believe that carbon removal is a tool for climate justice,” wrote CRSI executive director Anu Khan in her introductory blog post. “Justice requires accountability, and justice in the carbon removal sector requires the ability to rigorously count the carbon.”