I’ve long been inspired by the OpenAir Collective’s work on advocating for policies that will help scale up carbon removal. One such policy proposal the group is helping to advance - the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act (CDRLA) in New York State - has the potential to be transformational. This policy proposal would enable New York State to directly procure verifiable, additional, and durable carbon removal to help meet the state’s net zero goals. This could bring as much as 100,000 tons of carbon removal demand online by 2025.
CDRLA is a bold and unprecedented policy proposal in a big state with many competing priorities. The policy - if it gets passed - will look different than it does today. But amazing people at OpenAir like Toby Bryce (Twitter, LinkedIn) have made some real progress in the last year. If the effort succeeds, it could have a huge ripple effect on how governments support carbon removal worldwide. I thought it would be a great opportunity to check in with Toby, learn about the vision for CDRLA, the progress to date, and what the future looks like for public procurement of carbon removal. Show links and transcript follow.
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Show Links:
Join the OpenAir Collective to get involved in similar advocacy efforts where you live
Watch “This Is CDR” on OpenAir’s YouTube channel
Read the CDR Primer
Read California’s "Getting to Neutral” report
Learn about the innovative programs at NYSERDA
Transcript:
Na'im Merchant: Hi everyone. My name is Na'im Merchant, and I'm excited to be with you today. I'm trying something a little different here on the Carbon Curve. So let me give you some background. There is a legislative proposal underway in New York State that would use public procurement to support the scale up of carbon removal called the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act or CDRLA.
And I've wanted to get the latest on this potentially groundbreaking policy effort, but instead of jumping on a zoom call and keeping that conversation to myself, I thought I'd use the opportunity to share what I'm learning about this exciting effort with the broader community of Carbon Curve readers.
My hope is that this conversation raises awareness, sparks conversation and inspires action around public procurement of carbon removal. So today I'll be speaking with Toby Bryce, a startup advisor based in Brooklyn, who works on policy advocacy with the OpenAir Collective, who will walk us through the CDRLA and then I'll pose some questions for him at the end.
I hope you enjoy it. Welcome Toby. Thanks for being on. And why don't you take us through the CDRLA?
Toby Bryce: Will do. Thank you Na'im. And thank you for having me. It's very exciting to be here and I'm a big fan of the Carbon Curve and it's fantastic and super insightful. And so thank you for all the work you do on that.
So as Na'im said, there is a legislative policy proposal that's now a bill a live bill in New York state called the carbon dioxide removal leadership act the bill is sponsored in the assembly by a very powerful upstate assembly member from Albany as the main member Patricia Fahy and in the Senate by Senator Michelle Hinchey. So we have strong legislative sponsorship building, a very strong roster of co-sponsors.
This is actually my local assembly member, Emily Gallagher (DSA the democratic socialists) in Brooklyn. And she really gets it and she sponsored the bill immediately. And she's also sponsoring the building electrification act in New York. And so she's really prioritizing emissions reductions.
We need to electrify everything, decarbonize, the energy grid and retire every piece of infrastructure that burns fossil fuels. For those stubborn emissions, approximately 15%. This bill creates a New York state procurement program to accelerate and scale durable carbon removal. Honestly, I could not ask for better framing and that came straight from a legislator, which is super gratifying.
Just a quick background on OpenAir. The group that researched, developed and drafted this policy. And we were working on finding the sponsorship and actually advancing it through the legislature. We're a global volunteer network dedicated to the advancement of carbon dioxide removal solutions, essential to solving the climate crisis.
We work on an open source basis, grassroots. We have R&D projects and we also work on policy advocacy and activist market development. Quick background on carbon removal, which is not necessary for this audience, but it's important to say up front carbon removal are activities that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and durably store it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs or in with products.
And this is the definition that we pull straight from the Bible of carbon removal. This is carbon dioxide removal primer. The bill basically as Na'im says leverages the power of public procurement to provide market support to scale durable carbon removal. We are creating an actual procurement program for New York to buy carbon removal.
It's anchored to the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which passed in 2019, which is basically New York's net zero law. And we'll get into those details in a minute. It creates an annual target for CDR procurement for New York and mandates a schedule for this procurement starting in 2025 and running through 2050 to close a policy gap in the CLCPA that again, we'll explain in just a second. There are all sorts of benefits from the bill that will get into jobs and industrial development. The bill is very much centered on environmental justice and equity. And so lots of great things about the policy. All of you are familiar with this chart, but basically there's growing, pretty much complete, almost complete scientific consensus that gigaton scale carbon removal is going to be necessary by mid-century if we have any chance of meeting our climate goals of limiting warming to 1.5 or even two degrees Celsius. That's just a fact. It bears repeating. And we always say, first of all, that carbon removal is not a substitute for emissions reduction.
Emissions reduction must come first and be prioritized. We must decarbonize our economy as quickly and as completely as possible full stop. We also are going to have to even with a 1.5 or two degree warming, there are going to be all sorts of changes to our climate that we're going to have to adapt to.
And then finally, the final piece of the puzzle is we are going to have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. The old bathtub analogy. We at OpenAir tend to view a carbon removal from a waste management frame. We have a waste management problem in our atmosphere. We need to clean it up. We need to turn the tap off first and make sure that we are basically eliminating all emissions that are possible.
But for the emissions that are already in the atmosphere, we need to remove. New York's really established a leadership position in climate which is one of the reasons we're starting the policy here in New York. Again, the CLCPA was landmark, certainly North America's first net zero legislation.
NYSERDA, which is the New York energy research and development authority has invested quite a bit of money, tens of millions of dollars into carbon tech via some really amazing programs, the carbon to value accelerator, which just opened a second round of applications, the carbon tech development, and then the carbon tech fellowship which is bringing Activate to New York, which is super exciting. New York obviously has amazing universities and research institutions. Many of which are working on CDR. Carbon180 had a landmark paper a couple of years ago that established carbon tech is a multi-trillion dollar global market and a trillion dollar market in the US- so that means millions of jobs.
And really this decade we need to start deploying at scale. As mentioned, this is a statewide opportunity for New York. There's work underway to investigate a wide range of carbon dioxide removal pathways in the state. There's great mineralization well-known at Cornell on rock dust, which is grinding up basalt and spreading it on agricultural fields as a soil amendment, which draws down CO2.
Columbia has pioneered mineralization research that has gone into making carb fix work in Iceland. And there's an exciting project on the Pacific coast of Canada called Solid Carbon, which is co-locating offshore geologic storage with offshore wind and DAC. Ocean CDR in New York has the long island coastline, amazing opportunities for deployment of biomass based CDR solutions like Running Tide.
There is a fantastic research out of Stony Brook university, a project called Seamate, which is an electric chemical process to pull acid out of the ocean. That was recently commercialized by a company called Ebb carbon and was part of Stripe's most recent round of CDR purchases. We have great timber resources and we have agricultural resources that support this policy.
And also there's the opportunity to deploy direct air capture in the state from a sequestration perspective, the geologic sequestration opportunity is somewhat limited, but there's a vast off-shore geologic sequestration opportunity for CO2 in the medium term. And in the very near term, we can put basically all the CO2 that we're likely to capture into concrete.
Here's another graphical representation of all the carbon tech activity that's happening in New York. So again, the policy sits inside or alongside rather the CLCPA, which is New York's net zero policy, which is based on 1990 emissions level of 410 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. It mandates that 85% of the decarbonisation or the net zero happens via emissions reduction.
So that really protects the CDR policy in New York from any sort of moral hazard argument. We already have to reduce emissions. We have to reduce 85% of these 410 million emissions that tons of CO2 equivalent. The remaining 15% of the CLCPA has an an offset compliance mechanism. That for us is not net zero aligned.
It allows pretty much anything to be an offset. It does not require that an offset be a removal. You can do emissions reductions, it's possible under certain circumstances to do renewable energy credits. So that's really the part of the bill that we're targeting. And we are not attempting the legislative lift of actually rewriting that section of CLCPA.
The CDRLA sits alongside it. Eventually they would have to be integrated, but that's sometime in the next 15 or 20 years. But like right now we're starting with again, a procurement program to address that 15% of the net zero target, which amounts to by 2050, 61.5 million tons of CO2. Here's a little chart, zero to 60 we like to say, so it's starting in 2025. The procurement level will be a hundred thousand tons. And then that scales up initially doubling year on year. And then obviously that slope has to decrease to get to 61.5 million tons by 2050.
Na'im Merchant: Really quick question before I forget, is there an effort to revise the 85 / 15% split?
Are people feeling pretty good about that? Is there a desire to reevaluate the, the baseline tons we're looking at from the 1990 level to something that's more recent? You know, I'd love to hear a little bit more about how that's how that's being addressed. And then I'd also want to point out that, like this starting point of 0.1 million tons in 2025. That's probably higher than the durable, long duration, carbon removal that's being done today, but that's just in one state. So that's a bit that doesn't look like a big number. That's a big number.
Toby Bryce: So yeah. Yes. I'm going to go in reverse. Cause I remember the second question better.
It is a big number. Number one, it's also our opening number. I would expect during the political process. The policy, the scale of the policy gets trimmed back. If not, there is a ten-year delivery period, which we'll get into in a minute on the annual tender. So the companies that are bidding on the CDR from 2025 will have 10 years to deliver the CDR.
Hopefully that makes it feasible. And again, we're also working with a wide range of CDR pathways. So no one pathway has to do the whole job. But so we're going to get into a little bit more of the portfolio approach of the policy in a second. Number two, on the 85 / 15 we've taken that as a given.
I think there might be sort of an emerging consensus best practice that a net zero commitment should be more like 90/10. The recent bill that failed in California was 90/10. I believe the SBTI, the science-based targets initiative recommends a 90/10. You would know better than I probably I am not aware of any explicit effort to revise the CLCPA in New York.
So we're just working with with those targets. The policy framework is adaptable and we're gonna, we're gonna, we'll get into this toward the end, but we are looking at other states and like this content, the political, the legislative context, the regulatory context, the political context, the social context.
And to some extent that will sort of like scientific context of what CDR pathways are relevant will vary by jurisdiction. So the policy framework is intended to be adaptable to different jurisdictions. New York is our initial, I mean, I happen to live in New York and New York has this amazing existing CLCPA framework that we can align with.
So that's where we're starting, but definitely the intent from an open air perspective is for this to be a multi-state effort. And to try to get this bill passed in a number of states.
We would like to make the 15% that is not going to be reduced of New York's net zero commitment to require that those be removals. This bill does not do that. This bill starts to building the capability for New York to do that. And so basically it's a five-year authorization on the bill. So we're in that lower right quadrant. So we're starting small. We're sort of building the capability. And from our perspective, the there's no policy like this really anywhere in the world. And we think it's an, any net zero commitment has to have a removal component, whether it's 10%, 5%, 15% Massachusetts happens to be 80 20.
I believe New Jersey is as well for their net zero policies, but whatever that hard-to-abate emissions component is. Those have to be balanced out by removals otherwise you're not going to get to net zero. Other key components of the policy it's standards-based and we're going to get into that in a second.
So again, the policy is not directing New York. The legislation is not directing the state in terms of what specific CDR to procure it's setting standards and the state will make the determination on annual basis, which CDR pathways are most apt. One important piece of this policy was for me at least. And I think for a lot of us inspired by the getting to neutral report in California, which I'm sure many of your readers are familiar with, which is an amazing piece of work that came from a whole bunch of authors led by Roger Aines and his team at Lawrence Livermore, national lab in Livermore.
And basically that was a survey of the different CDR pathways that, that exist in California and basically how can they tabulate to get to the California removal number, which is 125 million tons. So the bill requires the New York state to do a similar survey in New York to basically survey all mega ton plus scale potential CDR pathways in the state.
And very importantly, there needs to be a companion survey alongside these. To explicitly ask and consult with local communities. How will these development of these pathways and the scaling of these pathways affect local communities and actually go out and ask local communities. And that's something that I think we've all learned that you really have to do upfront.
So the policy makes an explicit directive of the state before we start doing this, because this doesn't start until 2025 that you go out and do this work, understand the science, and then also understand the social dimensions of the different CDR pathways. A couple of other components, policy elements the direct procurement model employees, a reverse auction mechanism and reverse auction.
If you look it up on the internet, it can be very complicated. The actual legislation is not complicated. It's basically it could be a single round reverse auction. There's a bidding period in 90 day bidding window and suppliers can come in and put their bid in. They can revise their bid, but they don't know what other people are bidding.
Every year there is a cap and average annual price. It starts out at $350 per ton in 2025. And so that means the state has a $35 million budget to buy a hundred thousand tons of CDR in in 2025. The state has the option to pay more for either a more expensive pathway and emergent pathway, but it would need to balance by buying some lower cost tons as well.
And as I mentioned, there's a ten-year delivery period. As the volume scales of the maximum price decreases right now, it's a very crude 5% decrease year on year as the volume scales. I think that would work fine for the first five years, but obviously it's very difficult to predict further than that to the future.
So I would expect for future authorizations of the bill, that that would become a little bit more sophisticated, as I mentioned its standards based. So we have a definition of additionality in the bill. So, you know, obviously the removals need to be additional. There needs to be clear third-party MRV and lifecycle analysis for all the CDR projects to qualify for the bill.
Durability. We decided to go with a hundred year floor on durability or minimum durability, but there's a preference for more durable pathways. So if you have greater durability than a hundred years, your, your projects are gonna be preferred and I'll explain in a minute how that works. So basically, because this is state procurement, the state can factor non price considerations into its purchase decisions.
So unlike a very difficult to execute that on a compliance market. So that's one of the reasons we like a procurement policy. As I mentioned, we can just bet we can factor durability or also factoring scalability of the CDR pathways and more scalable CDR pathways would be preferred equity and environmental justice in New York.
There's a concept of disadvantaged communities that's been written into the CLC PA and that's actually being revised right now by the department of environmental conservation in consultation with environmental justice groups. And those are basically the frontline communities that have borne the sort of negative brunt of the fossil economy for the past hundred plus years.
And so those benefits to those communities, which are actually defined by law in New York will be preferred and make a CDR project preferred under this procurement system. Job creation ecosystem and other agricultural co-benefits. Those are also factors that are, that are preferred. Otherwise, those non-prescriptive, again, we're not telling , the state what CDR to buy in the legislation, just the standards and then the preference factors.
And then we're going to let the market and science and innovation deliver the most effective and efficient solutions over time. This is doubling down on the standard side, additional durable, verifiable, and then equitable it's in a different colored box because it's so important. And it's really, you know, politically it's important, but also from a moral perspective, just because the fossil economy has done so much harm to so many communities that we have this opportunity now to build a new economy that will distribute its benefits more equitably.
And so that is very much centered in the policy. Graphical representation of the procurement scorecard. Again, it's a preference for durability in excess of a hundred years. One of the things we've been hearing a lot about as the bill has been out there is energy use. So there are definitely clear preferences in the bill for more energy efficient CDR projects and pathways. It might be that we need to put a floor on the energy efficiency, because we are getting some concern. Like what if your carbon removal is purely powered by fossil energy, you're not actually removing anything on a net basis and practice, basically every CDR entrepreneur that I've ever talked to. The first thing she, or he cares about is energy requirements because it's their biggest cost. And it's also a selection factor for anyone they're selling to, but we might need to sharpen that up in the bill. Jobs, industrial development, community benefit. And then as I mentioned, some agricultural co-benefits. How are we going to pay for it?
So, as, as I mentioned, we view. Carbon removal from a waste management frame. There's a concept called extended producer responsibility. When you think about waste management that applies to things like recycling bills, basically whoever's creating the waste needs to be responsible for removing it. And you know, emitters should pay the originators of fossil carbon should pay for its removal from the atmosphere.
I mean, that's just like a clear moral truth at least to me. One problem though, with any sort of EPR possibility, any sort of EPR any,
Policy ultimately those costs tend to get passed on to consumers. So both again, morally and politically, it's extremely important that this bill not be viewed as a tax on lower middle income, new Yorkers or whatever the jurisdiction is.
And so the hard to abate sectors they're actually defined in CLCPA. There are things like shipping and trucking, concrete. Many of those things would get passed on sort of nondiscriminately to consumers the sector that we decided to target in terms of further funding mechanism for the initial authorization was commercial aviation, because we felt like it was the least regressive of the hard to abate sectors, because flying is, you know, relatively affluent people and business people tend to be the the largest volume of, of flyers.
And it's somewhat discretionary relative to feeding your family, which relies on shipping for example, As it turns out there are all sorts of rules associated with what states can do in terms of taxing commercial aviation. Our initial idea was very rudimentary to put a per passenger fee on, on arrivals and departures from New York's airports of which there are many every year, so that a $1 fee on domestic arrivals and departures and a $3 fee on international arrivals and departures would actually more than pay for the bill.
But you can't do that. Again, we're very fortunate there is another bill pending in the New York legislature to repeal existing corporate tax subsidies on fossil energy, fossil carbon. And one of those is a corporate tax subsidy on on fossil fuel for commercial aviation. And so that is turns out is permissible.
And so we're repealing that, and that will pay for the bill and and then funding will need to be re-evaluated for future authorization. So the next step, so the initial authorization, as I mentioned is five years, 2025 to 2029 fiscal New York which starts in April. So April 20, 25 through April 20, 29 or 2030, I guess.
And then 2030 you know, we'll need to have a new authorization. And if the bill continues to scale, we'll have to find other ways to pay for it. But I think that the politics hopefully will be a little bit different by then, in terms of things like putting a price on carbon and
Na'im Merchant: I get you correctly, it sounds like.
New York state currently subsidizes fossil fuels for commercial aviation. And by repealing that that would pay for at least that first segment. The first few years of of CDRLA is that right?
Toby Bryce: Exactly. Yes. And there are other, I mean, it's crazy, you know, I think I don't, you read all sorts of numbers out there about how much we've been subsidizing the fossil carbon industry, but it's trillions of dollars.
I mean like many hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And, and so in New York alone, You know, it must be, if we're getting hundreds of millions of dollars from commercial aviation, it must be billions of dollars a year in New York subsidizing the fossil carbon industry. So yeah, those have to go.
I mean, so anyway, that, that. Yeah. So like Senator a great she's hopefully going to be supporting the bill as a co-sponsor, but Senator Liz Krueger from Manhattan has this great bill. Her staff went through the tax code and found all of the subsidies on fossil carbon and she has a bill to remove them.
And I can't imagine, and I stayed with the democratic super majority that that's not going to pass. So so anyway, that's very good news. I think. All right, let me finish up. Cause I feel like I've gone over my time here. So anyway, just to recap, you know, the purpose of the policy is to memorialize or like enshrine the idea that, that the public sector needs to start buying,
funding carbon removal. Otherwise we have no chance to get to gigaton scale. The voluntary actors like Stripe and Shopify and Microsoft and Swiss re and all of the others have done amazing work pioneering this concept of procurement of CDR, but those numbers are drop in the bucket relative to where we need to get.
And the voluntary market will hopefully scale, but we need the public sector to step in and we feel like the net zero frame is a great place for the public sector to do it. As discussed earlier, you can't get to net zero without removing CO2 from the atmosphere. So unless you can cut a a hundred percent of emissions, which is not practical on a climate relevant timeframe. Market support for this potential multi-trillion dollar industry, which already has taken some really great early steps in New York.
They're important job creation, industrial development benefits. You always, it's always good to flatter legislators about extending new York's leadership, but in this case, it's true. We are a climate leader in New York and California or climate leaders in North America. And I think the idea that we pass this policy, we do it right.
And then it becomes a model policy that will be adapted on a state by state basis, but to like local conditions, but that hopefully will pass in other states. So in terms of where we are, the process was over a year ago now. Well, almost exactly a year ago, we had this idea. We started working on it and our process was we talked to probably 50, 60, maybe even more experts in the CDR space. Policy experts, researchers, entrepreneurs, legal experts. And we had this sort of initial thesis, but we learned and refine that thesis as we talked to people and by the summer we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do. We drafted the bill over the summer.
We started showing it to legislators, talking to legislators We had a bill like an actual bill by, I think September, October. We showed it to a few legislators Assembly member Faye was super excited about it. And she actually made an announcement at COP 26 that she was going to be sponsoring the bill and landed a Senate sponsor pretty recently.
You know, things obviously slowed down over, over the holidays and we'll - I guess someone, your questions get sent to this, but the New York legislative session starts in January. So now it's in session, it's an introduced bill and we just need to take the steps necessary to build support for it.
The other piece that I would leave you with, I mentioned that it's a multi-state effort. So we're starting in New York and New York is the place we have an introduced bill, but we have, you know, pretty lively conversations going California, I would say is the furthest along, but like engagement with legislators about introducing a policy based on the CDRLA framework in California. Had some early conversations in Colorado, some good conversations in the Pacific Northwest, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, because they have existing net, zero policies -are fertile ground for this policy. We had a, you know, Illinois, we've had some good conversations via, Will Burns the CDR law expert.
And we've even had some conversations in Arizona that stemmed out of arizona state university center for negative carbon emissions and Klaus Lackner. Arizona is a red state Republicans. So we having take a different approach, but there is a Republican legislator that's super keen on the technology. So that's going to be more of like a technology focus, like scaling technology lens for the policy, but point being working on this in other states. And if you're listening we'll put this in the show notes, hopefully, but we'd love to get you involved with OpenAir because we need people. All of these states have individual volunteer, citizen lobbyists teams who are working to add to advance policy and it's a lot of work. And so we need as much help as we can get. And I would also say that it's fun. So we'd love to have you join us. That's that's all I got.
Na'im Merchant: That's amazing. Thanks so much, Toby. That was great. It's, it's amazing to see the progress that's been made here since, you know, you started first moving along on, on this policy effort and I'll definitely be providing the show notes. I've got written down here how to get involved with OpenAir so that you can help recruit more folks to, to pursue this in other states, as well as the, This Is CDR series was excellent. And I think it was a really valuable educational tool for policy for the general public.
so I'll include some links on that as well as the CDR primer and the Roger Aines paper and some of the other things you mentioned, I think there's some really good resources. What I really like about this is how elegant it is as a solution for scaling up carbon removal. You're absolutely right. That like, you know, the likes of Shopify, Microsoft, and Stripe have been been leaders in this space and we need more of them for sure. But long-term, you know, carbon removal gets scaled up in the framework in my view that you've outlined here. I also really like how it built on, you know, existing legislation. It identifies a gap where there's maybe limited clarity on what to do with hard to abate emissions and it proposes something clear on how to address that.
And it does so with important themes around equity and justice you know, job growth, some of these other pieces that need to be considered. So I'm keen to hear more about the strategy to build on this in other states, it seems like there's an opportunity. You mentioned a number of states that maybe have net zero policies, and there's a similar opportunity to get clear about what to do with that 10% or 15% or 20% of residual emissions.
I'd love to hear just what gets you excited about the ripple effects of this across, across North America, across the world?
Toby Bryce: Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, the thing that excites me most is getting any bill with this framework passed somewhere. It may not be in New York. I mean, the, the success rate for introduce legislation is depressingly low.
I mean, it might not even be 1% like low percentage points of the bills that get introduced at least in New York every year pass. That said OpenAir got one passed last year, as you referenced the low-carbon concrete leadership act. And so that's the hope and we were able to do it.
But the thing that I'm most excited about is, is getting a bill passed that gets the public sector buying carbon removal as part of a net zero commitment, or as you alluded to part of some other climate policy. It just has to be part of the portfolio. I feel like I might not emphasize it enough in my slides.
But. Emissions reductions have to come first. Like that has to be in New York it has to be like 90% of our effort needs to go into emissions reductions, but we can't not deal with the other 10%. It's a lot, you know, gigatons. So it has to happen. Gigatons are not going to happen without the public sector buying CDR or funding CDR.
And so that's what gets me most excited about. The other thing I would say is, and you know this as well as anyone, but, and your Carbon Curve posts highlight this, but it's a super exciting industry, super fun to like, learn about this stuff. The chemistry and just all of the, the science behind these different CDR pathways.
And they're varied, you know, we're not just talking about giant, you know, giant machines, sucking carbon out of the sky. Which are exciting, but there are, first of all, as you pointed out many times, there are many different approaches to DAC, but there's also mineralization, there's enhanced rock weathering.
There's thinking biomass to the bottom of the ocean. There is burying wood waste, biomass underground, you know, gasifying wood biomass and, and extracting hydrogen and then sequestering the resulting carbon. There's so much cool stuff going on. That's the other thing that gets me excited, but it's going to be this incredibly robust commercial sector.
I'm very convinced of that in the next five to 10 years, and it's fun to be a part of it. And it's also, it's a sector that's doing really necessary work from a climate.
Na'im Merchant: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with all of that. I, you know, I'm wondering, you know, as you think about next steps here, and you've laid some of that out, what do you see as potential stumbling blocks?
Like, it's not easy to pass something like this. It's pretty groundbreaking, but it's still early stages. And so what are some of the stumbling blocks or thinking about, and, and how, how are you all thinking about mitigating them?
Toby Bryce: There are many, I mean, there are a lot of stumbling blocks, but I think that this is a new policy it's early stage.
So you just have to like contextualize it against reality that, that the primary the limiting factor is people. So like if people want to get involved, we can build teams and work on this and in any state we can also, we definitely need more people in New York to help, like get more legislative sponsors for the bill and then there'll be other jobs to do as we, as we move forward. I would say the primary obstacle is just like the massive legislative load. And I'm not, I don't know. About other states to know if it's the same in every state, but in New York, they're just tons of bills, including tons of really good and important climate bills. So I think the primary obstacle is just getting legislator mindshare.
They're so busy. It's a five month session. They're trying to get a ton of stuff done ton of stuff within climate, and then a ton of stuff outside of climate- transit housing. I mean, there's this tons of work that the government has to do. So that's number one, I would say, just competing for attention and mind share, committee time, getting a vote. So that's the primary obstacle and there is opposition. So, you know, in New York, I mean, it's almost a little sad to say it because they think it's good to search for common ground and work on things on a bipartisan basis. Just doesn't happen in New York because the Democrats have a super majority and the Republicans are completely unwilling to even entertain any democratic ideas.
It's like performative. So the opposition from the right is not meaningful in New York, but it will be meaningful in other states. I mean, Virginia has a new Republican governor and Virginia is a state that was just about to pass a low carbon concrete bill. So we'll see what happens with that. You know, Arizona is a red state, so this policy definitely has bi-partisan potential, it would just need to be framed differently. The biggest obstacle in New York from an opposition perspective has been from the left and I would break it down into a couple of pieces. There was a sort of hysterical uninformed opposition that, that I think we've all encountered on Twitter and elsewhere that, that carbon removal is a false solution.
It's greenwashing, it's bad. There's a lot of conflation of carbon removal with carbon capture, meaning point source capturing carbon from point source emissions, which is a form of emissions reduction. I don't want to tell them, but frankly it's likely to be necessary. I mean, a natural gas plant that helps us get over the next 20 or 30 years, it's capturing its CO2 is going to be beneficial.
I'm assuming that can be done in an energy efficient way. Which I think there are emerging solutions to do that including Verdox, which recently just announced that they're doing both direct air capture and point source carbon capture. So there's sort of like the misinformed opposition from the left and there's like the more reasoned opposition that is why work on this now when we need to be reducing emissions. And I think the answer to that is we have to do both. Governments big government can do a lot of things. And we just need to, we, we need government to do both and, you know, government, 90% of the work on the climate front has to be an emissions reduction, but we need to start working to build the capability to scale.
Durable carbon removal. I guess the other piece there is potential. I think there's possible opposition from industry. Once they actually have to start paying from it, paying for it. I don't think the commercial aviation industry has gotten wind yet of the repeal of their tax subsidy in New York. So there's potential opposition there.
I don't think that'll be very meaningful in a state like New York, but it could be meaningful in other states and it will certainly be meaningful. I mean, eventually to fund this policy at its full scale, , they'll need to be some sort of price on carbon. The carbon take back obligation or whatever it is, they'll have to be some sort of price on the origination of every ton of fossil carbon.
Na'im Merchant: Yeah. I think just a pull on the other thread and what do you say to folks who say, you know, we like carbon removal. I think it's a good idea, but it's, it's not mature to be approaching the public sector with it yet. What's your response to that? Do you get that question? And if you do what do you say?
Toby Bryce: Yeah, yeah. I mean . So one of the things we're doing in New York is trying to get support from advocacy organizations. And very luckily we got New York league of conservation voters to sign on early on. And that's big probably in every state, but in New York they have a checklist of climate legislation they like, and we're going to be on that checklist. And there are many legislators who just vote that list. So that's big. Like if we can get through committee into a vote that will position us well. But other organizations are saying, yeah, you know, okay, fine carbon removal is great, but like what we need, we're behind on our emissions reductions, target.
What I would say to them, right. Let's keep working and like, let's get on track on the emissions reductions target. I mean, new York's announced tons of like the new offshore wind funding in recent weeks, even. And that's happening. It's not happening fast enough. So we need to move faster on that. A thousand percent agree, but we're not going to get to gigaton scale carbon removal if we don't start scaling and providing additional market support for it now, Stripe and Shopify, Microsoft can't do it alone. And the public sector has to get involved in the end. We have to do it. Now. This is a decade, you know, you, as you well know, Robert Hoglund's 50,000 ton number. I mean, there was 50,000 tons of durable carbon removal happening and in 2020.
And maybe that's not exactly the right number, but it's not more than a hundred thousand tons. And that's like, I don't even know how many orders of magnitude away from where we need to be by 2050. And so, you know, I think Robert estimates that we need to be at tens of millions of tons globally of carbon removal by 2030 to like be anywhere near on track to get, to get a ton by 2050.
And that is just not going to happen if the public sector does not get involved. It's 2022. And like, you know, this bill starts happening in 2025. So like that's the way government works. So we have to start now in my opinion.
Na'im Merchant: That's a great point. And also, I'm curious, you know, we've mentioned, we've talked about the Stripe Shopify, Microsoft, who've done this, who've taken this, this leadership role in the private sector and the voluntary and a voluntary manner.
What does, what does the advancement of public procurement? And maybe we're getting a little ahead of ourselves here, but what does this mean for their role as you of, know pioneers in this?
Toby Bryce: I mean, first of all, I, you know, I think we all have to thank the, the, the calls and brothers and the other Toby and the other folks who are holding the purse strings for funding these early purchases, because we would be nowhere without this.
So they've been super important. We've talked to all those people about this policy. They've been super supportive. They've been super generous with their time and insights and given us some really great feedback. I mean, a number of things in the bill have come straight from comments from people who work at those companies.
I think that the amount of money that they are working with and they can be working with on the one hand is a lot to an individual early stage CDR project for their first purchase, but they can't keep buying these tons forever from every company. So they need more customers. And so basically, you know, we're as people graduate from, from their programs, programs, like the CDRLA will help nurture and support them.
On the flip side. I don't think that frameworks like the CDRLA are going to be good for supporting high risk early stage first purchases from emergent CDR projects, companies ,pathways. And that's where I think the stripes and the Shopify's of the world will continue to play a hugely important role.
There's a lot left to the discretion of the department, the government, which is the department of environmental conservation in New York in terms of what actually gets bought. But it's hard for me to imagine that New York under the CDRLA would buy the first tons from a Running Tide. You know, I think that the new stuff will still have to get funded by either philanthropic or, I mean, it's effectively philanthropic voluntary carbon market capital from folks like Stripe..
Na'im Merchant: Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's a really interesting exit ramp for companies that are incubated and benefit from these early purchases. That's why I think it's so important that Stripe really focuses on and some of these companies focus on those early purchases and then they have some, some potential runway down the line through, through public procurement, which, which like you said, would not be a great mechanism for for your first tons, your first unit, your first plant, whatever it is. So that's, it's really cool to see the, where do we go from here? Questions start getting answered for the likes of Stripe Shopify, Microsoft that have taken bets on some of these really early stage carbon removal companies.
What else would you like people to know about CDRLA and how can folks get involved?
Toby Bryce: Well, let's put in the show notes, it's openaircollective.cc/join. Basically you fill out a form and open air the group lives on a discord server, which I have to say personally, I like better than slack, but it's like slack and robust conversation, all sorts of people on there, like volunteer enthusiast, well-known researchers and that's how we organize. And like I said, wherever you live We could have an advocacy effort for a policy like this. Certainly in any us state. And we also have we don't, we don't have time to get into it, but then we have a policy that is being originated in the EU that is very different, but also to support durable carbon removal.
So that's what I would like people to know. I mean, it's a long haul and it's a work in progress and. One thing I like to say is that you know, when I moved to New York many years ago, at this point, a friend of mine worked at a hedge fund and he was very young and he was writing legislation for a Senator who will remain nameless to do his company's bidding.
So corporations have been writing legislation in this country and probably everywhere for centuries and it's time for citizens to start writing legislation. And that's what OpenAir is all about. And I think that anyone can pitch in and we have tons of work to do all kinds of jobs. And so I'd love to have you as, as part of that.
Na'im Merchant: I love the open-air collective. I think it's was like one of the first groups I've engaged with in, in my own journey and sort of working in climate change and carbon removal. And you just see this like diversity of people and experiences and passions and interests and come together, come together and organize around missions to solve, you know, policy challenges, technology challenges, advocacy, activist, challenges. It's, it's a really great group to get involved in.
well, listen, thanks so much Toby for sharing and I hope folks will reach out if they're interested in learning more and getting involved, I'll definitely put the links to the OpenAir Collective in the show notes.
And if you enjoyed this as well do subscribe to the newsletter. If you came across this or someone forwarded it to you. And if you think there's a conversation we should be having, or an idea that you'd like to present to a growing list of subscribers on carbon removal and the new carbon economy, you know, write to me in the comments or reach out on Twitter, LinkedIn, but thanks for making the time and Toby thanks again. I really appreciate it. This was really, really educational and interesting.
Toby Bryce: Thank you. That was fun for me. And I really appreciate you having me on. Keep on with the great work with the Carbon Curve.
Na'im Merchant: Thanks so much. Take care.
A Bold Vision for Government-led Procurement of Carbon Removal (Video + Transcript)