2021: A Good Year for Carbon Removal
Not just any list! The people and ideas that inspired and educated me on carbon removal in 2021.
This past year was an exciting one for carbon removal. From new start-ups to groundbreaking policies, there were almost too many developments to keep track of. Nori has published a 2021 carbon removal recap, Jason Hochman has an excellent month-by-month breakdown of the biggest carbon removal and direct air capture (DAC) news of the year, and Carbon180 has a great rundown, too. Instead of reproducing the deluge of (mostly) good carbon removal news in 2021, I thought I'd share the carbon removal thought pieces, resources, and actors that captured my attention, inspired me, or educated me in 2021. I hope you find something in here that resonates with you as much as it did for me. Let me know what you think I missed in the comments!
💡 Thought Pieces
The increased awareness of carbon removal in 2021 has brought with it new perspectives, learnings, and scrutiny.
📝 Carbon Removal Cheat Sheets: Supporting the carbon removal space is more than making carbon removal purchases. It’s about sharing lessons learned and insights to bring more potential buyers and supporters on board. That's exactly what Microsoft did by publishing a white paper on its carbon removal purchase as did Shopify with its carbon removal playbook.
⚖️ Equity and Justice: Approaching climate change with a global equity and justice lens is what drew me to the carbon removal world, and frankly, it's what keeps me here when I'm feeling burned out. David Wallace-Wells frames the global inequities of climate change in terms of reparations, and this interview with political philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò touches on the responsibility of rich countries to clean up their historical emissions.
🤖 Reigning in the Hype: This list would not be complete without a healthy dose of skepticism around the hype that sometimes surrounds carbon removal. This excellent long essay by Clive Thompson is a must read, as is James Temple's article on the risk that carbon removal hype becomes a distraction.
📗 Reports and Analysis
Foundational climate reports and eye-opening exposés dropped throughout 2021 bringing carbon removal’s role in fighting climate change into greater focus.
🇺🇳 Eat Your (Climate Change) Vegetables: The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report brings together the latest scientific understanding of climate change and climate science. If, like many of us, you didn’t get through all ~1,300 pages, there are summaries for policy makers, technical summaries, and fact sheets.
📉 A Climate Roadmap: As someone who regularly digs into energy and emissions projections from various global agencies, I found IEA's Net Zero by 2050 report to be an excellent "how-to" roadmap on transitioning to a net zero energy system (though it's always important to take projections with a grain of salt).
🌲 Forest Offsets Suck: While protecting forests is critical to fighting climate change, today’s forest offsets (in my view) are deeply flawed. CarbonPlan's analysis revealing systemic over-crediting of forest offsets, and ProPublica's accompanying piece on their research, was absolutely groundbreaking and solidified my concerns with forest offsets (as they literally went up in flames this past summer). I also helped Giving Green update their findings on the challenges finding high integrity forest offsets in voluntary carbon markets.
🏗️ Concrete Pathways: You'll see more writing from me on decarbonizing concrete, and why I think it will play a critical role in DAC adoption. Earlier this year, ClimateWorks published a report on how to decarbonize the world's most used building material. It's not a sexy topic, but it's super important. Shameless plug: Check out the page-turner I co-authored on federal procurement strategies for scaling up low-carbon concrete. Seriously, though, it's good stuff.
📚 Resources and Books
Learning about carbon removal is becoming more accessible, making the field potentially more inclusive than ever.
🍏 The CDR Genius Bar: I don't think you will find a more comprehensive, approachable, and well-written overview of all things carbon removal than the CDR Primer launched earlier in 2021. Written by pre-eminent researchers and thought-leaders in the carbon removal space, it's a resource I continually refer back to. Speaking of resources I refer back to, CarbonPlan's CDR database is continuously updated and a fantastic reference to the diverse array of CDR providers.
👩🏫 Class is in Session: Whether you're interested in becoming a "high flyer", "climate student", or "climate master", Carbon Removal Academy has become an excellent starting point for anyone interested in learning about carbon removal.
🔬 Sector Deep Dives: I recently worked with the amazing team at Giving Green on their carbon offsets and carbon removal research. Since they launched, their research has evolved into a comprehensive resource covering numerous carbon removal sub-sectors as well as analyses of different types of carbon offsets. Giving Green is a valuable tool for those looking for the best ways to spend their money (or time) fighting climate change.
📓 Reading List: While sci-fi is my preferred genre, here are a few climate-related books I read this year (or plan to read in 2022): How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (Bill Gates), The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson), Speed & Scale (John Doerr), Ending Fossil Fuels (Holly Jean Buck), and Termination Shock (Neal Stephenson).
🎙️ Webinars and Podcasts
Because, let's be honest, no one reads anymore.
🤓 Interviews with Carbon Removal Bosses: My Climate Journey did a few great policy-oriented carbon removal and sequestration episodes in 2021.
First up is the episode with Erin Burns, Executive Director of Carbon180, on driving carbon removal policy change in the United States.
Next is the episode with Dr. Shuchi Talati, Chief of Staff at the Office of Fossil Energy & Carbon Management in the Department of Energy and how this important office is taking a more expansive view of fossil energy under the Biden administration.
And finally, the episode with Sarah Saltzer, Managing Director of the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage discussing the importance of carbon storage (not just removal).
👩💼 "How I Built This" for CDR: The OpenAir Collective is an awesome community of carbon removal advocates and experts. I encourage you to check them out. They recently launched a series of online events called "This is CDR" to explore a broad range of carbon removal solutions. Recent recordings include interviews with Charm Industrial CEO Peter Reinhardt and Mars Materials CEO Aaron Fitzgerald. You can find more great webinars on OpenAir's YouTube channel.
✈️ Guilt-free Flying: Decarbonizing aviation will be... hard. The newly launched Catalyst podcast did a great episode on decarbonizing aviation and the always insightful (and proudly Canadian) Energy vs Climate podcast also has a recent must-listen episode on this topic. Side note: I'm hoping to share some developments on recent work I've been doing around sustainable aviation fuels in the coming months.
🚀 Start-ups
Companies and initiatives building the future of carbon removal.
🏅 Picking Winners: 2021 saw a number of exciting carbon removal companies emerge largely due to unprecedented VC investment and strategic carbon removal purchases made by Stripe and others. While I try not to play favorites as far as carbon removal start-ups go, since this list is about things I learned a lot from, I'm partial to the companies that participated in my two carbon removal deep dives in 2021. Check out my in-depth profiles on Mission Zero and Heirloom Carbon, based on the MOBILE Framework I launched earlier in the year. The Activate Fellowship and the Elon Musk XPrize are sure to bring more promising carbon removal startups to the surface in 2022 and beyond.
🇪🇺 Carbon Removal Europe: Advocacy group Carbon Gap launched in late 2021 with the aim of building support for smart, ambitious carbon removal policies tailored for the European context. Now we just need to do the same thing in Canada (seriously, get in touch with me! 🇨🇦).
💨 Delivering Carbon Removal: While Climeworks has been around for a while, the company unveiled Orca - a 4,000 ton per year capacity direct air capture and carbon sequestration plant in Iceland this year. That makes it the largest DAC facility in the world today. It depends on who you ask but we probably need another *million* more of these… Meanwhile, Charm Industrial delivered 5,000 tons of CO2 removal in 2021, the largest permanent carbon removal delivery to date!
I’m sure there’s a lot of great stuff I missed, but I hope something on this list that is as eye-opening or as inspirational for you as it was for me. Feel free to leave a comment below on a thought piece, report, podcast, or company that made an impact on you this past year. I’m genuinely excited about the year ahead for carbon removal and for this newsletter in particular. I plan to unveil some recent work and collaborations in the weeks and months ahead - so stay tuned! Finally, thank you for being a subscriber, and please share this post with friends who might appreciate it. I hope you have a happy, safe, and restful holiday break.
The views expressed in this post are mine alone and no compensation was received for publishing it. To receive regular ideas and analyses on carbon removal and the new carbon economy, please subscribe below. If you enjoyed this post, please share it with friends. And if you’d like to get in touch, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Great Summary Na'im! I had missed some of these updates and so its great to use the downtime at this time of the year to catchup. Thank you.