U.N. Slams Carbon Removal as Unproven and Risky

May 25, 2023

Print This Article Share it With Friends

by Corbin Hiar (E&E News Climatewire) A United Nations panel is casting doubt on the promise of using machines to remove vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the air and sea in order to fight climate change.

The skepticism from the high-profile organization sent shock waves through the emerging industry of carbon removal companies that many scientists say will be essential for the world to stabilize, or one day reduce, global average temperatures. It comes as the Biden administration is preparing to pour billions of dollars into the industry.

The panel questioned the technical and economic viability of startups seeking to clean up carbon that’s already been dumped into the sky, igniting pushback from an industry that is gaining popularity but so far has not captured sizable amounts of warming gases.

The U.N. panel called the sector “unproven,” with “unknown” risks.

At issue is a provision of the Paris Agreement on climate change that calls for establishing an international carbon trading program. Officially known as Article 6.4, the provision is the cornerstone of an envisioned worldwide system in which companies could offset some of their emissions by funding, for example, a new wind farm and then trading the offsets the project generates with foreign firms. Other businesses might try to meet their climate commitments by paying a company for carbon dioxide removal, or CDR.

The U.N. panel is charged with standing up that trading system. And the positions it takes on carbon removal systems could affect the trajectory of the industry.

...

There are two main ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere and oceans. One is to cultivate or protect CO2-hungry plants like trees and seagrasses. The other is to deploy carbon removal technology such as direct air capture, which uses fans, filters, piping and energy to pull CO2 from the atmosphere and pump it permanently underground.

In recent years, Congress has provided billions of dollars in subsidies to help establish the direct air capture industry in the U.S.

But the U.N. panel appears to favor so-called natural approaches.

“Engineering-based removal activities are technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks,” the panel wrote in a lengthy note released last week. “These activities do not contribute to sustainable development, are not suitable for implementation in the developing countries and do not contribute to reducing the global mitigation costs, and therefore do not serve any of the objectives of the Article 6.4 mechanism.”

The panel based its conclusions in part on input it received from several groups that are critical of carbon removal such as the Center for International Environmental Law and Friends of the Earth. Only a few carbon removal companies provided information to the panel while it was developing its note.

The fledgling industry is now scrambling to provide feedback to the United Nations before it makes any final decisions on the Paris Agreement’s emissions trading system.

“CDR is a new commercial sector, and the range of potential pathways are at varying stages of discovery, development, and deployment,” Ben Rubin, the executive director of the Carbon Business Council, a trade association, said Wednesday in a letter to the panel. “The sector is advancing quickly, and there are a number of approaches ready for eligibility under Article 6.4 now, with more expected to reach that stage of maturity in coming years.”

Rubin also took issue with the United Nations’ conclusion that CDR projects don’t help economies or ecosystems.

“We would be pleased to connect you with carbon removal leaders advancing projects in Kenya, Kiribati, India, Brazil, and other locations around the world where CDR is contributing directly to local and regional economic development,” he said in the letter, which was co-signed by more than 100 carbon removal executives and experts.

The industry’s delayed response indicated that it was unprepared to participate in a process that was important in its evolution, said Burns of American University.

...

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which includes the panel, did not respond to a request for comment.

The panel is accepting comments on the note through Thursday. It hasn’t set a deadline for establishing the emissions trading system but is likely aiming to make an announcement by the end of November, when the next U.N. climate conference is set to take place in the United Arab Emirates. READ MORE

Information note: Removal activities under the Article 6.4 mechanism (U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change)

U.N. panel scoffs at climate tool the world may need (Power Switch)

U.N. panel distances itself from carbon removal criticism -- Many leading scientists say natural and engineered removals will be needed to keep global temperatures from exceeding dangerous limits. Both have trade-offs. (Politico Pro)

Fuel for our mission (Isometric)

Excerpt from Power Switch: Carbon dioxide removal “is a new commercial sector, and the range of potential pathways are at varying stages of discovery, development, and deployment,” Ben Rubin, the executive director of the trade group the Carbon Business Council, said Wednesday in a letter to the U.N. panel.

Today, only 18 facilities worldwide suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it underground. Altogether, they capture less than 10,000 metric tons of CO2 per year — far less than the billions of tons scientists estimate need to be removed to reach climate goals. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico Pro: An influential United Nations panel signaled recently that it remains open to the idea of using carbon removal machines as one possible remedy for global warming — a stance that distances the panel from earlier criticism of the technology.

A note sent to the same U.N. panel last month from the U.N. climate secretariat raised concerns with engineered carbon removals, calling the approach "technologically and economically unproven." The note sent shock waves through the carbon removal industry, and it prompted an industry trade group to write the U.N. an open letter in response.

Following the backlash, the U.N. panel clarified it was still working to determine what types of carbon removal techniques it would endorse.

“I don't want to create an impression that we haven't been struck by the strength of the response. And that it that hasn't made a difference,” Olga Gassan-zade, the chair of what’s known as the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, said during its meeting last week. “It did. It was very helpful.” READ MORE

Excerpt from Isometric: Isometric is announcing a $25m seed financing to solve the most important problem of our generation.

We’ve launched a Science Platform and are building the first independent Registry for durable carbon removal. Together, these two products will accelerate the growth of the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) industry by open sourcing key information and establishing a new high bar for the quality of CDR credits—in order to build confidence in carbon markets.

This is the most important problem of our generation

Isometric needs to exist because the CDR industry is growing fast. Large catalytic buyers such as the $1bn+ Frontier Fund (from Alphabet, J.P. Morgan, McKinsey, Meta, Stripe, Shopify and more) are looking for quality, and suppliers are emerging to meet this demand.

The growth of CDR is not optional, per scientific consensus. While the world is currently only durably removing a few kilotonnes of carbon annually, the industry needs to grow to at least 3.8 gigatonnes per year by 2050—and potentially to much larger—to limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

That’s where Isometric comes in. By accelerating the development of nascent CDR technologies, and firmly grounding them in robust science, we support the push towards making the technologies more scalable and the credits more affordable. And from there, it’s full steam (turbines?!) ahead to reversing the damage caused by climate change.

The Science Platform

Today (July 18, 2023), we launch our Science Platform. Think GitHub for climate science.

The Science Platform is a community resource that enables suppliers to host and visualize their early processes, removal data and protocols in a clear and consistent way—allowing the scientific community to share feedback and advice.

We’ve already received tremendous feedback on the product, and will add more suppliers to the platform over the coming months. You can learn more about it here.

The Registry

We’re building a carbon registry unlike any other—underpinned by four key principles:

Scientific rigor

Isometric uses the latest science to quantify net negativity, durability, uncertainty and additionality across a variety of heterogeneous carbon removal pathways.

The resulting credits are of a higher quality than anything seen in carbon markets to date.

Transparency

The Isometric platform is built on the full traceability of carbon fluxes. Versioning allows the ecosystem to track changes as the science evolves. All data is available for inspection by the scientific community in real-time.

Trust isn’t built behind closed doors.

Incentive alignment

Isometric doesn’t sell or broker the sale of carbon removal tonnes and charges buyers—not suppliers—a single flat fee per offtake or purchase. The fee covers all the costs associated with developing protocols, verifying removals and issuing credits.

In this way, we minimize conflicts of interest in running our registry.

Collaboration
Isometric actively engages the scientific community and partners with experts in sensor development, physical inspection, auditing, earth-system modeling and data analysis to verify deliveries—including accredited VVBs.

We invite anyone working on monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) to reach out to us so that we can partner.

Our team

The Isometric team consists of world-class talent from climate science and technology.
Our science team is led by Elizabeth Troein, Ph.D. (formerly ARPA-E, MIT, Columbia and Princeton), a respected industry leader in carbon removal. Her team is composed of scientists from universities including Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Harvard and Stanford.
Ola Sitarska and Ellie Romer-Lee lead our technology and operations teams, which boast talent from companies including Amazon, Intercom, Meta, Palantir, Shopify and Wise (the list goes on…).
This is the most remarkable group of experts who are obsessed with solving this problem. I’m proud to be leading them.

If you want to join our journey, reach out and help us avert climate disaster.

Our investors

Investors of the highest caliber have placed their faith in Isometric.

Khaled Helioui at Plural was an early backer of my first company, Onfido, almost a decade ago. I was fortunate enough to have him as a trusted advisor, mentor and friend to lean on during my toughest times. It’s a pleasure to be able to work together again.
Ryan Orbuch at Lowercarbon Capital spent months helping me formulate the thinking behind Isometric before investing in the company. His depth of knowledge, experience and thoughtfulness when it comes to carbon removal are unparalleled. Ryan has now joined Isometric's board.

The future

If we’re successful in our mission, we’ll end up building the critical pillar underpinning carbon removal—the most important industry of the coming decades.

This is the most urgent thing to work on, and we’re doing everything we can to create the future we want to live in. READ MORE