Host: Radhika Moolgavkar
Guest: David Morrow | Director of Research | Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy at American University
Category: 📄 Carbon Policy
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[2:22] “Other than […] the big announcement about the US administration trying to drive innovation in CDR and bring down the cost of CDR, the most interesting CDR related news out of COP comes from things that don't actually talk about CDR at all. […] There are announcements about […] the decarbonisation of sectors that are often regarded as hard to abate sectors. So agreements between the US and EU on low carbon steel, for instance, and announcements about support for sustainable aviation fuels. […] These industries that have been held up as a potential market in a sense for CDR look like they're going to try to decarbonize without CDR. And so that's big news for CDR.”
[3:52] “The other big CDR related news that doesn't talk about CDR […] are the net zero announcements. In particular, India being the big one. I think, as of today, we are up to 90% of the world economy being covered by some kind of net zero pledge, although that ranges from things that are actually enshrined in law to some politician said, we're going to get to net zero by whatever. And there's a sort of obvious implication that there's likely to be a role for CDR in a country getting all the way to net zero.”
[7:49] “I think that the ways in which people have traditionally thought about what CDR might be used for with a policy goals [was] cleaning up hard to abate sectors, […] cleaning up legacy carbon, so removing historical emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere. And then sometimes this vague category of […] getting to net zero faster. And in the short term, through the next decade, I think that the only way in which it's really going to do any of those things is with forms of CDR that produce energy.”
[9:49] “No one's going to be in a real position anytime soon to be net negative and really start cleaning up historical emissions. And so other than those energy producing forms of CDR, I think […] short term, maybe even medium term it is about growing and diversifying the CDR industry. And diversifying […] in the sense of developing a broader range of technologies and practices to do this, so that different societies or communities […] can adopt the technologies and practices that make the most sense for them in their context. And then looking […] out longer term, you get to the negative, you get to potentially large CDR industries cleaning up historical emissions, and cleaning up […] the bits of industrial emissions or other emissions that we can't manage to eliminate yet.”
[16:31] “I'm a little, maybe irrationally, annoyed at how much of the focus is specifically on direct air capture, rather than carbon removal in general. But I do think these are important. And I think the approach of trying to build hubs is important. It's important for overcoming some of the […] financial and project risk associated with building a direct air capture plant or […] developing a geological storage site.”
Rating: 💧💧💧
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 31 min | 🗓️ 11/12/2021
✅ Time saved: 29 min
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