Can Carbon Capture Prevent Climate Change?

Energy Insights speaks with Duncan McLaren on carbon capture technologies and the implications they may have on the future of the planet, along with the technologies propertied promises, drawbacks and other governmental and policy issues such as its mentioning in the recent IPCC synthesis report.

Duncan is a postdoctoral Climate Intervention Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy at UCLA's School of Law. Much of his research follows climate politics and governance regarding geoengineering technologies and interventions.

Previously, he was a research fellow at Lancaster University and focused on the role of carbon removal techniques, governance on net zero and security politics of climate engineering. Duncan also completed his PhD at Lancaster University that looked into the justice implications of climate geoengineering.

From 2003 to 2011, Duncan was the Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland. His research has also been published in journals that range from the likes of Nature Climate Change, Global Policy, Energy Research & Social Science and the Anthropocene Review.

Twitter: @mclaren_erc
UCLA Law Profile
LinkedIn: Duncan McLaren

Transcript

Host (01:43): We've got a lot of ground to cover today on carbon capture, but I’m just wondering if you could give us a brief background on who you are and what you're currently doing.

Duncan McLaaren (01:58): Well, I'm a climate intervention fellow at the School of Law at UCLA where I looked at the moment mainly at ideas of solar geoengineering. But for about the last 10 years, I've been in academia in one place or another, looking at different forms of geoengineering, particularly the carbon geoengineering that includes carbon capture ideas. Before that, I worked for Friends of the Earth and my engagement with carbon capture goes back into that era and trying to work alongside Scottish Power when they were bidding for a UK carbon capture and storage funding budget back in 2009. 

Host (02:52): So you've got a nice long history there with the technology.

Duncan McLaaren (02:55): Certainly. It's been on my radar for a very long time. 

Host (03:00): Speaking of history, I think that's a good place to start. Could you give us a brief tour of where this kind of idea really came from and what the initial interests in this type of carbon capture technology were from a historical perspective? How far does this go back, given your experience, for example? 

Duncan McLaaren (03:17): Sure. Well, let's start with perhaps the difference between trees and technology. Ideas of carbon capture using natural systems, basically forests or trees, go back as long as climate change has been an issue and probably longer and certainly were controversial back in the 1990s in negotiations around Kyoto and so forth. As to how far countries could count natural sinks of carbon dioxide going into forests, for example, as part of the sort of carbon budget that they were working to establish. The idea of technological ways of capturing carbon, and those certainly also dates back to the 1990s; the very first commercial carbon capture and storage scheme started operating in 1996, which was taking some of the carbon dioxide out of a stream of natural gas produced at the Sleipner(04:38) field in Norway. They call this process gas sweetening. So that has 25 years [or] more of history. 

What followed that, particularly in the early and mid two thousand, was taking the technology that was being used there, a chemical separator that drew carbon dioxide out of the mixed gas and trying to apply that to the flue gas, the exhaust emissions from fossil fuel power stations, and particularly at that time and focus on coal-fired power stations. That's the technology that we normally talk about when we talk about carbon capture and storage. It's an end of pipeway of trying to capture some of the carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuel. So it’s an abatement or a mitigation technology that might reduce those emissions if it can successfully strip out CO2 that can be compressed [and] piped away to a permanent store. 

Since then, we've even seen, or we've seen, a move to worrying about the total carbon budget being exhausted and proposals to use similar technologies, not to abate emissions, but to capture carbon directly from the atmosphere and that we would normally call carbon dioxide removal. As I say, they're very similar technologies, but they serve different purposes in the climate policy mix. So at the top of the emission slope that we're at, we need to cut emissions quickly. Both CCS and CDR can help us accelerate that downward slope to get towards net zero.

Host (06:55): So, generically speaking, they're really trying to basically do the same thing.

Duncan McLaaren (07:00): Well, no, they're not trying to do the same thing, but in the current situation, what they produce is the same sort of outcome. They either reduce emissions directly or recapture some of those emissions so they can accelerate the downward slope. 

Where things get different is if we, or when we get to net zero. So net zero in fundamental terms is saying that any residual emissions are counterbalanced by active removals and it's only if we can do it from the atmosphere. Only CDR can counterbalance residuals. CCS can reduce the amount of residuals left, but it can't actually counterbalance them. 

Then there's a third role that, again, only CDR can do. And that's after we've got to net zero, we may still have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for it to be safe. So, scientists hypothesize that we will be using carbon dioxide removal to draw down carbon levels to return it to a safe situation. 

Host (08:19): Great. Now, as you've briefly mentioned, climate change, as we know, is a huge issue today and has been for a very long time, obviously, depending on who you ask. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are on what carbon capture's role in all of this. I realize that you've just touched on that as about drawing down the emissions, but I also think there are potential limitations to the technology, which we will talk about later as well. Do you think you can give us an idea of what you expect to see carbon capture do in the next decade?

Duncan McLaaren (08:56): Sure. I mean, let's delve down a bit into the sort of sectors and technologies that are involved here. Because while CCS was a proposal back in the two thousand, and there've been projects underway to try to get it running for at least two decades now, in the early part of that period, it was all about putting this technology on the back end of a fossil-fired power station; a coal-fired power station, or more laterally, a gas-fired power station. There are still some of those proposals around, but what we see today is very much more proposals for using it in the hardest-to-abate sectors. So places like cement or steel manufacture, where fossil fuel is used directly or in the case of cement, there's actually process emissions of carbon dioxide that come from calcine and the lime involved. Those sectors are now where we see proposals and those sectors I think we probably will see some commercial deployment of carbon capture. 

What worries me, I guess, is that we may see just the repetition of the sort of error of decades of promises that we saw with fossil fuel. Essentially, one analysis by Nils Markerson and his colleagues at Lancaster suggested that fossil fuel power generators were promoting these promises as a way to keep operating in the short term. And that they were quite happy that they were too expensive to actually be delivered because it meant that they didn't have to then deliver on them in the longer term. That seems to be what we've seen, that rather than these technologies being piloted, deployed, developed, going down a cost curve and becoming widespread, the two or three trials that have happened, there's literally only one commercially operating carbon capture plant on a coal-fired power station in the world today at Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, and that's been operating at a ranch somewhere around 50%, 60%, 70% capture, not the 90% capture rates that were always promised and would be necessary if carbon capture and fossil fuel was to be a useful contributor towards net zero. No good cutting emissions by 60 or 70%. We need to get residuals down to much less than 10%. So, yeah, I think we'll see CCS in the industrial sectors, and particularly we're seeing proposals for it in hydrogen production. So using it to process fossil gas, methane, CH4 to produce hydrogen, which, when it's burned, does not produce carbon emissions at the time. So one way of getting hydrogen is to process fossil gas. You need CCS to make that work in a low-carbon fashion. The other way would be to use renewable electricity and hydrolysis to produce the hydrogen. Both are under consideration, but we're certainly seeing a lot of proposals for hydrogen production. 

And then the other big area relates partly to the future, the net zero situation, and it's the idea of carbon capture technologies being used to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. So there's two technologies in particular that people talk about. They talk about bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, which works as a removal technology only insofar as the trees work as a removal technology. The idea is that you burn biomass, not necessarily from trees, but from farmed or forested biomass, and capture the emissions at the tailpipe and then bury them. So as long as the trees or the biomass has drawn down carbon from the atmosphere, and then you don't let it go at the end of the pipe, then it acts as a sort of negative emission.

The other is called direct air capture or direct air capture with carbon storage, and that uses the same sort of chemical means, or potentially the same sort of chemical means that have been proposed for flue gas, but on the atmosphere to take carbon directly from the atmosphere. I could go into more detail, but I won't at this point. Those proposals for both of those methods are multiplying fast. Technological ideas around them are diversifying. There were hundreds of bids to the XPRIZE process that's going on for a commercial atmospheric carbon removal device.

Host (14:55): Given the kind of absolute flurry of interest in the technology that we've seen even in the past couple of. I mean, if you go back, say ten years, I'm talking from a personal experience here, you read some of the climate literature back then and you really get a sense that it wasn't even mentioned. It really has just exploded onto the scene in a sense, where a lot of people are now beginning to take it very seriously. So, for example, governments are now looking at it as a potential technology to help them draw down their emissions. Why do you think this kind of conversation has changed so quickly from, you know, as you said that it was once piloted on to capture emissions directly coming out of a coal power plant and that never really worked out. Now the conversation's kind of shifted into these other areas of the economy. In your view, why do you think that has happened? Or how, how has it happened? 

Duncan McLaaren (08:56): Well, there's several things going on there. First, I think it's fair to say that CCS or fossil fuel was absolutely huge in climate policy 10 or 15 years ago. It was embedded in all the models and pathways that were used by the IPCC to guide governments in how fast they'd have to cut emissions. It's the history of that technology and how it was incorporated into the models and how it actively and deliberately was incorporated into models as ways that said, okay, this makes the decarbonization; but that wasn't the word used at the time; the emissions reduction path cheaper. We can do a more gradual reduction if we have these technologies coming online.

We see now effectively carbon dioxide removal playing a similar role in those emissions paths. And partly that's because the global understanding of how little carbon we can still emit has sort of tightened up. It's very clear that there is very little carbon budget left. So residual emissions have to be cut very quickly, and if we don't do that quickly enough, then we will have an overshoot situation in which there's too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the 1.5 or even two degrees centigrade guide rails will be exceeded. I think a lot of the interest in carbon removal, as a CDR technology, a way of removing carbon from the atmosphere, is because it promises a sort of time machine for the climate. It says we can roll back the state of the atmosphere to the point that we want it to be in. It can make the models add up, again, even though the budget is now so tiny and even though we've understood that 1.5 is a much safer target than two degrees [celcius] as temperature rises over the pre-industrial.

Host (18:40): Would you say that this, just going back to overshoot, I just wanted to linger there for a bit. Would you say this concept of overshoot and the idea that they can couple carbon dioxide on, in case we go over the carbon budget and then we couple carbon dioxide on removal onto this overshoot model, is this kind of like acting to just throwing in the towel right now and surrendering and say, we're gonna go over, there's no point in reducing emissions now, we've got this technology that we can bank on to fix this up later. Do you see that as a bit of a risk? 

Duncan McLaaren (19:14): Yeah. I think for some actors, that's a very real risk. In the same way as CCS as a promise that we could decarbonize the power station in the future, as long as you let us build it now, we'll put CCS on it later, was essentially what power generators were saying in the two thousand. For those who have, whether we're talking states like Saudi Arabia or corporations like Exxon, those who have huge investments in fossil fuel assets; they want to use those to their utmost, they want to sweat the assets out for as long as they can. And the promises of future removals allow them to do that. 

Where I guess I worry most is the way these have got embedded in the pathways in the climate models that leave governments, not other governments, not necessarily clear of what will be going on there. I think there's very real risks that we'll see another era of procrastination as a result of the future promises of carbon dioxide removal. 

Having said that, we do have, and “we” is a difficult word here because, of course, it's the people of the rich world that have consumed the carbon budget, not, in general, the majority world in the global south, but there is very little global carbon budget left. I think it would be irresponsible of policy makers not to consider, well, what could we do if we get into a situation of overshoot? If we simply did nothing about carbon removal until 2050 and discovering that we were perhaps headed for a 2.5 or 2.7 degrees temperature rise by the end of the century, then it would be practically much more difficult, probably practically impossible, to accelerate carbon removal to its maximum sustainable level rapidly. What we see at the moment is, I guess, promises of carbon dioxide removal that exceed what I think could be done in a sustainable and fair way at 2050 or 2060.

So I'm a little bit in two minds. Yes, there's a huge problem there and we need to build [a] policy to try to avoid that procrastination. But at the same time, I think we do need to be investing in and developing what is sustainable and possible in carbon dioxide removal. 

Host (22:36): I guess you could almost argue that the picture isn't so black and white right? It’s shades of gray in a sense.

Duncan McLaaren (22:41): Exactly. 

Host (22:43): Just building on that and speaking of governments in general, there has been real interest now and there is, at least seemingly, looks like there's a lot of money being thrown behind it now. For example, in the US, you've got the bipartisan infrastructure law that's got, I think, $12 billion in support for carbon removal technologies. And then you have tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, for example. Then you've also got, as you mentioned before, you've got companies like Exxon who are throwing money at this potential technology, and then you've also got tech companies like Microsoft investing into carbon removal technologies. Where do you see all of this heading? Do you think that this kind of rush of money into the technology itself will improve it or will it speed it up or will it make it cheaper? 

Duncan McLaaren (23:38): That's certainly the aspiration of the policymakers here.

It's experience with many technologies has shown that, yeah, there are economies of scale, and there are economies of learning. And the more of these things we do and the bigger the scale we get to, the cheaper we can make them. So that's certainly the aim. 

The reality, I think might prove different in the sense that many of these techno-, oh, there are differences in these technologies. One of the potentially really important differences, I think, will be between those that involve building huge industrial plants that are, it's jargon, sort of big and lumpy. Big, single big investments, like the ones that went into attempting to do CCS on fossil fuels. The Kemper Country was going to be CCS on coal. It was at least almost completed but has now been demolished. The reason for that was that it couldn't achieve the capture rates required. The regulator said then it can't be fueled with coal. It became uneconomic, so they had to get rid of it. That's an extreme example, but those sorts of lumpy investments. 

Let me give you another one. Petra Nova, a $1.2 billion investment in a fossil CCS plant. It's made about a 60% capture rate at best. It's now been shut and was sold, and the developer got about 1.5% of their investment back. When that happens, it's really, really hard to learn and move on. Whereas if we could trust that with the way the solar photovoltaic industry has developed, where you've got hundreds of millions, billions of panels, each one, essentially a learning opportunity. The reason I mentioned that is that some of the technologies that are being advocated for direct air capture look like big old CCS plants, and some of them look a lot more like solar panels. So the challenge for the investors here and the government, I think, is going to be to find the ones where fast learning rates are possible. I'm not sure they're the ones that best match up with the fossil fuel interests because one of the interests for the fossil fuel industry is not just being seen to cut emissions. It's to have a supply of carbon dioxide for a technique called enhanced oil recovery. So these companies like Exxon, Chevron, or Occidental have interests in being able to pump carbon dioxide down into nearly exhausted oil wells to get more oil out. Yes, some of the carbon stays down there so that's a positive. But we need to understand where the incentives are coming from as well. I'm particularly worried that under the tax credits under that have been raised by the Inflation Reduction Act, that have gone up to offering up to $130 a ton for carbon dioxide that is stored in a what's called carbon utilization mode, which can include enhanced oil recovery. That's not necessarily going to help us keep carbon dioxide or keep carbon in the ground. 

Host (28:04): I think you gave us a really great tour of, kind of the promise of the technology. Now, I do wanna pivot into the potential drawbacks and the caveats of the technology that have been raised. Now, you have spoken of some of them already, but now a lot of people, especially clean energy advocates, are worried that, and sometimes what activists call these “false solutions.” Now I'm putting that aside for a moment. I wanted to get your thoughts on carbon capture and storage itself, just in general. What are some of those known caveats in storing carbon underground, so to speak, and have there been any examples of success or failure? What about the problem of leakage that some have raised and, how do you actually measure? Is there a proper measurement for these storage facilities? Do we have any evidence that the carbon does indeed stay in these storage, these underground reservoirs, for example? 

Duncan McLaaren (29:09): Well, let me speak first briefly about what you might call the biological storage because quite a lot of the money in the US Act and a lot of the emphasis in Europe is on storing carbon in soils, forests, and possibly storing carbon in oceans.

In these more natural settings, leakage or permanence is a real problem. I mean, a farmer might change their practices to increase the carbon in the soil, but it just takes one year of deciding to plough it all up for a lot of that carbon to come back into the atmosphere. A forest might be storing carbon for years or decades. It takes one big wildfire coming through and most of that carbon's back in the atmosphere. In those sectors, there are real challenges with leakage and permanence. 

By contrast, actually, in these more technological sectors, with the exception of the enhanced oil recovery problem, there is good evidence that the carbon can be measured. So you know how much you're pumping down into an underground storage facility and that it is staying there at very high rates. There have, to my knowledge, been no proven incidents of serious leakage from any of these facilities. [There] have been concerns about them, and it's possible that there has been some leakage, but I think we can fairly safely consider these things as having millennial storage permanence, that they will stay there for thousands of years. That's partly because when the carbon dioxide is in these spaces, it starts to either dissolve into the existing fluids there, water or whatever and to mineralize with the rocks down there. So it's not gonna come out again quickly. 

As I understand one of the, there's any question about are there enough places to store? How much can we store? I think, again, the geological evidence says actually there's a lot of options here. Whether they're all as commercially viable as we might like is a different matter. That's why the enhanced oil thing is such an issue because that makes it much more commercially viable to put it into and not just because of recovering oil or gas, but because if you are decommissioning an oil or gas field, you may already have the adequate pipework or pipe work that only needs some upgrading. So the costs of actually using that field like that, as it comes to its shutdown, are much lower than developing a new store from scratch.

The limits on the storage side are, I don't think going to be the most pressing. With all of these things though and remember that if it's carbon capture on fossil fuel or an industrial source, it's just doing some of the job of [the] embankment for carbon dioxide removal, doing some of the job of offsetting our residuals, this is where we have to worry about can we do enough of that to offset all the residuals because every form of carbon dioxide removal has some sort of penalty. So either with BECCS, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, the limit tends to be the amount of land that we can allocate to growing the biomass. In the models, projected requirements to achieve net zero on sort of standard model runs come to using one, two, or three times the area of India to grow biomass. That's obviously going to generate all sorts of conflicts and compromises about land use and I would argue is clearly unsustainable. But if you were to use DACs instead, then you have a high demand for energy. This is not a free process. You’ve gotta use energy to get carbon out of the atmosphere.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation for the same amount of DACs suggests that it would use nine times the primary energy use of India. So, again, problems of conflicts with the need for energy for decarbonization, the need for energy for the global poor and fuel poverty, all the same issues we would talk about in terms of competition for land, for food; we should be talking about in terms of competition for energy. If we go down the pathway of what we might call a loose convergence, so a net zero situation in which there are a lot of residual emissions and a lot of removals, those are not going to be sustainable situations. Which brings us back to why I'm so worried and why I think you are worried to say that these things could actually delay the decarbonization process. Leave us in a situation with higher amounts of residuals. 

Host (35:58): Actually, I read an article of yours in The Conversation. It was published back in 2019 about the over-exaggeration of how much bio-capture can happen. In that article, you argued that some of these studies are kind of distracting people in other areas of emissions reductions that can actually be very quick. For example, electrification of transport would be one thing or more renewables on the grid as another example. Do you see more of this happening in terms of carbon capture becoming an issue where it really distracts policy in terms of a shift away from very low-hanging solutions?

Duncan McLaaren (36:45): I'm not sure it discourages the low-hanging solutions. Where I see it as most pernicious is that it discourages the solutions that the policymakers see as particularly difficult. So they may think that they're very expensive, and often these are. Particularly things that policymakers think are going to be politically unpopular. So measures that would constrain our freedoms to drive, or our freedoms to fly, or our freedoms to eat beef as much as we want. Those are the things that policymakers in the West, at least, very afraid to push forward, even in the face of evidence from things like citizens assemblies, that if are done collectively, if everyone is subject to some fair set of pre-agreed rules, there would likely be more public support for them than there seems to be.

We also see just how quickly these things get captured by the hard right, if you like. If we look at the spat over gas stoves in the US, there are republicans who are listing gas stoves alongside guns, as things that they would go to the wall to defend their right to use. When you see the conspiracy theories circulating in the UK over low-traffic neighborhoods, the idea [is] that we would do neighborhood-wide traffic calming to reduce people's incentives to drive. These are being presented as sort of climate lockdowns and surveillance measures and so on, turning them into very politicized issues.

So when policymakers face those sorts of responses, I think it's very easy for them to rely on the promises of carbon removal or even, indeed, of solar geoengineering, as ways to say, well that's how we will deal with the residual emissions, rather than take these what seemed to be politically difficult decisions. 

Host (39:33): It's a bit of a rabbit hole. That one going down the politics there. Speaking of politics, I just wanted to get your take on the inclusion of carbon removal in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report, which just got released a couple of weeks ago now. Since then, it was reported that at the urging of governments like Saudi Arabia and China were urging for the inclusion of carbon removal into that document. Do you see any conflict there of what some may call an endorsement by a UN climate body? What kind of signals does this give to the world or others that aren't as bigger, powerful nations as, say China?

Duncan McLaaren (40:22): Sure. So I'm going to probably sound a bit anti-science here, even anti-IPCC, which I'm not. I think the IPCC has generally done an absolutely amazing job, but it is, by its constitution, a very, very conservative body. It's pushed consensus thinking, which is consistently some years behind the leading edge of climate science, and that's understandable. It is then bound into this summary for policymakers’ processing, which governments have a role in approving those summaries. So we have this latest set of reports that are able to say yes, the consensus says that the carbon budgets look like this. That squaring them almost certainly requires large amounts of carbon removal. They're not able to say very much about those sort of radical emissions reduction approaches. Talking about de-growth is clearly not going to get into the summary for policymakers, for example. They're in much the same bind.

Having said that, I am worried that the carbon removal stuff is all given as a sort of matter-of-fact, obvious objective evidence. The risk that it will encourage policymakers to over-rely on it, is buried deep. There's a couple of references deep in the report. It doesn't get up to the levels of, even the technical summary, never mind the summary for policymakers. At the same time, the IPCC is so heavily dependent on a small set or few families of integrated assessment models. These integrated assessment models have known problems. They all, to some degree, have some discounting of future costs. So any speculative future technology looks relatively good in these models, especially in comparison to short-term action that looks expensive.

The models, it's very hard to model behavior change and to put a price on it. Some of the few model runs that basically suggest we could achieve 1.5 [degrees celsius] without very high levels of carbon removal. The modelers, I can say, have to hack the models to introduce things like, low-meat diets or whatever, in ways that the models themselves wouldn't adopt because of the dynamic of least-cost adoption of technology, which is embedded in these integrated assessment models.

I think there's still a real problem. There have been some proposals in the modeling community for her to make better, of the thousands of model runs considered by the IPCC. Only a handful are doing things in the sort of novel way or a different way. The vast majority are suggesting this need for high levels of carbon removal based on some very, I wouldn't say, speculative. The point is you have to put a cost on it for it to work in the IPCC or in the IAM. Once there's a cost on it, if it's been deployed in the future, that cost gets discounted, whereas the costs of doing difficult political interventions in the short term seem very high. So the model has this tendency to use future magical thinking over the short term. Perhaps magical thinking. I'm not denying that those things might be hard and are difficult, but the models doesn't put them into any sort of symmetry. The models are very poor at accounting for the co-benefits of that short-term action.

So if we cut fossil fuel use more in the short term, we will have a much healthier population. This'll be much less air pollution. It's again, only a few of the model runs include that. Others don't. If you don't include that, then it will look to the model as though doing future carbon removal is better than doing the short-term cutting of traffic.

Host (46:05): It's a pretty fraught process, that's for sure. Personally, I think the consensus model that it runs on is very problematic. I can understand the intentions behind it, but in the day and age that we are living in now, it is certainly putting up a few barriers in terms of getting things done rather than a majority speaking, for example.

Now, given all that coming into mind, I just had one final question. Just some healthy speculation here. What is your prediction? If you have a prediction on where carbon capture is going and how you think we're gonna get there and will it, in fact, have a big impact on the future of the planet?

Duncan McLaaren (46:58): I think it will have [an] impact. I wish we didn't need it to. I wish we could be confident of going down a pathway in which we didn't have to rely on it. I think I'm gonna offer two scenarios. 

One is the particularly scary scenario that, what will drive the development of carbon capture, well of carbon dioxide removal, will be the offset market that people will be doing this because they can sell offsets to those who are currently emitting and this will go on and create a really unhealthy bubble, if you like, of increasingly illusory carbon dioxide removal. [This is] because we know from experience that the offset markets are basically markets for lemons. They encourage the presumption of the lowest quality, lowest standards, and lowest prices. That is not a very healthy way forward at all. In the end, I don't think that will deliver a desirable amount of carbon capture and storage or of CDR.

The other route is that the governments that have started to step up, and I've been critical of what's happened so far under the bipartisan infrastructure, or the Inflation Reduction Act. I'm similarly critical of what's going on in the UK, where there's 20 billion pounds being allocated for carbon capture and utilization clusters, and pretty much all focusing on the carbon capture and storage, the abatement of existing emissions rather than on the future removals side. But I think that across the piece, those offer us a better foundation for the sort of targeted investments that could be politically balanced with continued aggressive mitigation programs.

They haven't worked well yet. Something like 50% of the first trench of tax credits given under the tax credits that have been increased under the IRA were rescinded by the US authorities because they couldn't be properly verified. So we’re clearly not doing a good job of this so far. But I do think it has to be public sector led, and it is possible we're in the public sector for those governments to set clear separate targets. So they have a target for emissions reduction, which remains aggressive and a target for building up carbon dioxide removal to the levels that are needed to then balance off residuals in 2050 or earlier if possible.

Host (50:49): There's a lot of work to be done, I suppose. 

Duncan McLaaren (50:52): Yeah. I think the crux is understanding the risk here, rather than just saying this as, oh yeah, free for all. Let's get the market prices right and, and we'll all be dandy. We've had 30 years of people saying, oh, all we need to do is get the price of carbon right and capitalism, as usual, will solve the problem. Well, it hasn't. So maybe we need something other than capitalism, and we certainly need capitalism as unusual if we are going to get through the climate crisis. 

Host (51:31): No, I think there's some big questions ahead, Duncan, and you've answered a couple of them. Thank you so much for your time and, and sharing your expertise and thoughts on this evolving matter. Thanks a lot for coming on. 

Duncan McLaaren (51:45): Yep. Well thank you, Ashley, and I'm sure we'd have more to talk about in a not very long period, given how fast this is moving.

Host (51:31): Exactly. Until next time.