Big Businesses Are Doing Carbon Dioxide Removal All Wrong

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will require removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s foremost authority on the topic. But only some types of carbon removal are actually effective—and these are largely not the kind that major companies are investing in. A new report from the NewClimate Institute, a European think tank, finds that 35 of the world’s biggest businesses are leaning on short-term tree-planting and other forms of “nondurable” carbon removal in order to say they’ve neutralized some of their climate pollution. The handful of companies investing in more reliable carbon removal are mostly not doing so in conjunction with deep decarbonization, or the elimination of carbon emissions altogether. There is a “dangerous mismatch between corporate climate claims and the reality of what is needed to reach global net-zero,” the organization said in a press release. Reaching net-zero by the middle of the century—a scenario where all unavoidable human-caused climate pollution is canceled out via carbon removal—is considered necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, refers to efforts to capture CO 2 after it’s been emitted into the atmosphere and store it in rocks, land, ocean reservoirs, or human-made products. The most reliable types of carbon removal, which the NewClimate Institute calls “durable CDR,” involve injecting carbon into geological formations or turning it into rocks, where it will stay put for at least 1,000 years—about the same amount of time that CO 2 from the burning of fossil fuels will remain in the atmosphere. Currently, these durable techniques don’t work at scale: They account for just 0.1 percent of global carbon removal each year. The rest is based on methods like planting trees, restoring wetlands, and burying carbon in the soil, which are much cheaper but can only keep carbon out of the atmosphere for decades or a few centuries at most. Government investment and regulations are needed to scale up durable CDR—experts consider the next decade to be “crucial” for developing the technology—but the private sector can help too, by funding durable CDR projects and research. In industries like construction, for which total decarbonization is not yet possible, companies will likely need to use durable CDR to offset residual emissions as part of a credible climate strategy. The NewClimate Institute authors looked at 35 of the world’s largest companies across seven sectors: agrifood, aviation, automobiles, fashion, fossil fuels, tech, and utilities. Tech companies showed the most investment in durable CDR—Microsoft alone is responsible for 70 percent of all durable CDR ever contracted—but the report criticizes the sector for planning to claim “potentially significant amounts” of both durable and nondurable CDR toward net-zero targets. Tech companies can fully decarbonize without offsets, so their emissions targets should not depend on carbon removal.