8 high-impact actions you can take to advance carbon removal

For problems as large and complex as responsibly scaling carbon dioxide removal (CDR), it can be hard to know where to start or what to do next. In this post, I describe eight actionable activities that could have a significant impact on CDR. These activities include (1) advocating to political representatives; (2) volunteering with OpenAir; (3) communicating about CDR; (4) finding ways to increase demand; (5) applying for a new job; (6) finding solutions to the moral hazard; (7) continuing your education; and (8) conducting “small experiments.”

Climate anxiety, particularly among youth, is a real and growing concern. It is a reasonable response to the current and mounting impacts of climate change and stubbornly high emissions. From those working in climate, and perhaps from your therapist, you will often hear that the best relief for climate anxiety is focusing on what you can control and engaging in radical acceptance for what you cannot. Fortunately, engaging in pro-climate actions not only helps one feel better but is also exactly what is needed to make progress on the crisis before us.

Based on my experience working in carbon dioxide removal (CDR), I developed this list of potentially high-impact opportunities for effectively advancing this particular type of climate technology. The proposed ideas are purposely broad and diverse to allow multiple entry points depending on your abilities, resources, level of risk aversion, and interests.

Frontier’s carbon removal knowledge gaps database, which is a great source for specific project ideas, lightly inspired this post.

Advocate for CDR to your political representatives

If you are lucky enough to live in a democracy, then you can and should leverage it beyond just voting. Politely but firmly advocating for carbon removal to your political representatives has the potential to significantly influence much-needed governmental support for the technology. As CDR is a relatively bipartisan pursuit, direct advocacy can be valuable regardless of party affiliation.

I used to believe that writing letters to, calling, and arranging meetings with politicians’ offices was not a valuable use of time and that policy was decided by forces well outside of the average citizen’s control. This may be true in many cases, but it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Directly petitioning your representatives can make a difference. Smaller, more specific, and less politically charged requests naturally have a higher chance of getting implemented, so you must be strategic and coordinated with your asks. The probability that one touchpoint alone will make a meaningful change is low, but the expected value of this action is tremendous when considering the effort-to-potential-reward ratio.

When advocating for CDR, emphasizing benefits to the representative’s district beyond merely mitigating climate change—such as job creation, community benefits, and increased tax revenues—can be an even more powerful way to make the case. Sharing personal, compelling stories and noting or even getting endorsements from other groups in the district would also help sharpen the pitch.

If you live in the U.S., you can use this resource to identify your federal, state, and local representatives. Similar resources likely exist for other countries. You can get involved at the international level by providing input to the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which is in the process of setting rules for global carbon trading markets, either through calls for input or unsolicited letters. Contacting representatives at all levels of government is important as CDR needs support at each of these levels to scale.

Volunteer with the OpenAir collective

There are several CDR-focused nonprofits such as Carbon180, Carbon Removal Canada, XPRIZE, and Rethinking Removals, although perhaps the only one that you can easily and directly volunteer with is the OpenAir Collective. OpenAir is a volunteer-based, decentralized organization with a set of missions representing diverse approaches to advancing CDR.

I have participated as a judge with OpenAir’s annual Carbon Removal Challenge, which invites university teams from all over the world to develop CDR projects and brings the finalists together in person to present and network. OpenAir was working on this idea years before I heard it pitched as an effective solution to get young people involved in CDR at the Bezos Earth Fund CDR event in February, suggesting it could be well ahead of the curve in terms of advancing unique and impactful carbon removal efforts.

The organization is behind notable activities such as the Low Embodied Carbon Concrete Leadership Act, various versions of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act for state- and federal-level procurement of CDR, and the video series This Is CDR. Given the importance of grassroots support for CDR and related educational efforts, volunteering with this group or even simply donating could be a high-impact opportunity for advancing the field.

Communicate about carbon removal

As a public good, CDR’s funding structure at scale will probably look more like that of waste management or the military than solar panels or smartphones. Public goods rely on positive public perceptions to maintain both a social license to operate and large-scale public funding or mandates. Emerging engagement efforts and polling indicate a substantial lack of public familiarity with carbon removal. If you search for “carbon dioxide removal” on a platform like YouTube, you will also find that a large fraction of the popular media out there is quite negative and skeptical of the technology.

People often laugh when I suggest that we need more pro-CDR content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. But this is not a joke. Awareness and acceptance are vital to facilitating community acceptance of large-scale CDR facilities, building the required workforce for a gigaton-scale industry, and securing favorable policies at all levels. Actors in major, incumbent sectors like energy and agriculture understand the power of public relations quite well and often leverage it for detrimental outcomes. It would behoove environmentally beneficial industries like CDR to invest more in positive communication efforts.

If you work in carbon removal, you have likely had some experience perfecting your pitch about your work to family and friends. This is a valuable and important proving ground, but you should consider how you can amplify your message. Writing articles, posting on social media and message boards, commenting on videos and articles, making videos, or even becoming a pro-CDR climate influencer could all go a long way if done well. Targeting young people is especially important, as these individuals have more time in their careers to dedicate to working on CDR and will play an increasingly influential role in society over the next couple of decades, which is the timeframe in which CDR needs to scale rapidly.

If general online engagement is not for you, then delivering lectures on CDR to primary and secondary school science classes is another valuable communication opportunity. Last year, I gave a lecture on climate careers and carbon removal to environmental science students at the high school I attended; you can see the slides I used here. The students were highly engaged, and this type of activity creates value even if you only reach one student and inspire them to work on climate or CDR. If you want to broaden your reach beyond your alma mater(s), programs like Skype a Scientist can help facilitate a broader reach to students around the world.

Boost demand

There are several primary CDR pathways and multiple sub-pathways under each one, many with the potential to offer hundreds of millions of tons or more of carbon removal per year. The supply is there if we are willing to tap into it. While the CDR market will naturally oscillate between over- and under-supply in the short run, the broad, long-term issue it faces is building ample demand. While gigaton-scale CDR funding will need to be regulated in one way or another, voluntary purchasing will play a key role in the near and medium terms. Increasing demand in the short run is also necessary to sustain higher credit prices and volumes that allow more providers to survive to the point where they can receive government or compliance-based funding.

It might seem difficult for an individual to unilaterally boost demand. It is. But every purchasing choice can be traced back to some individual who set it in motion. There are also small ways you can personally support CDR that in aggregate have a meaningful effect.

The most direct way you can boost demand is through buying CDR. You can find a thorough list of carbon credit marketplaces on page 31 of my public bookmark repository, although not all allow for B2C sales. Several CDR companies such as Climeworks, UNDO, and Charm Industrial also have individual subscription programs allowing you to buy direct.

In addition to purchasing CDR credits yourself, there could be tremendous value in developing innovative ideas and strategies to boost demand across the market. Stripe is launching a fellowship to have individuals do exactly this with a focus on clear outcomes and tractable solutions. However, you do not have to be part of a formal program or organization like this to brainstorm and share your thoughts with the world. Consider taking time to develop a unique solution and publish it, as you never know where that could lead.

Finally, you should consider how you might be able to influence your current organization or other organizations with which you are involved to start buying CDR if they do not already. This kind of “intrapreneurship” can go a long way and could lead to the next round of multi-million dollar CDR purchases.

Apply for a new job

How likely is it that your current position is the ideal one to advance carbon removal and build the career capital you will need to have an even larger climate impact? If this is the case for you, then you should probably stop reading Substack and get back to work. If not, then you should consider applying for a new job that will either allow you to have a larger impact in CDR or develop the skills necessary to do so.

There are a number of CDR-specific job boards out there, such as Jobs in Carbon, CDRjobs (coming soon), and the DAC Coalition job board. You can also investigate the careers pages of companies on databases like my DAC company list, AlliedOffsets, and the Carbon Removers Index. Other resources like the So You Want to Work in Climate spreadsheet, Climatebase, Work on Climate, and the 80,000 Hours job board also often feature interesting roles that intersect with CDR.

Find solutions for the moral hazard/mitigation deterrence

One of the key risks of CDR is the moral hazard or what some call mitigation deterrence, which is the possibility that deploying CDR will cause society to delay or never engage in necessary emissions reductions and thus detract from global climate targets. The moral hazard issue is a risk on its own but also often pits CDR advocates against the rest of the environmental movement, which is a necessary ally for advancing climate solutions.

If emissions reduction targets are watered down due to the promise of CDR and removal capacities do not materialize as expected, then the climate will be worse off. If reduction targets are weakened and CDR does materialize as expected, then—relative to counterfactual emissions reduction scenarios—this may still be more resource-intensive, enable continued industrial operations in vulnerable communities, and delay the achievement of net-negative emissions that is needed to begin reversing climate change.

For example, imagine a scenario where global society continues emitting at its current rate but dedicates significant portions of energy and land area to remove enough carbon to abate all our current emissions. This would technically allow for carbon neutrality but would be tremendously costly, environmentally intensive, and risky should the removals cease.

There is some optimal level of CDR, and this level should be fairly and democratically determined by those who have a stake in the global economy and Earth’s climate (i.e., everyone). Residual/hard-to-abate emissions, which will likely need to be offset with CDR, are demarcated by socially constructed notions of necessity and possibility, implying a need for collective decision-making about the ideal path forward.

However, the real-world incentives and politics here will be complicated due to jockeying to continue business-as-usual practices as well as uncertainty around the key question of which parties will be forced to directly pay for CDR. For example, if a government intends to pay for CDR credits and retire them on behalf of certain industries, then the incentive for those industries to invest in emissions reductions pathways may be reduced.

Carbon Gap has published a 12-point plan for avoiding mitigation deterrence, and various industry actors (including myself) have called for the establishment of separate reduction and removal targets to avoid CDR being used to excuse unnecessary emissions. However, these plans and ideas leave a lot to be desired. Many focus on implementing separate reduction and removal targets, but if we were able to implement robust and enforceable reduction targets in the first place, then we would not be in as dire of a situation.

Given the magnitude of this problem, more people need to spend time thinking through concrete and achievable strategies to ensure that CDR scales in a responsible, restorative manner that does not actually detract from climate change mitigation. Reviewing academic work on the subject could be a good place to start—you can find several related articles on page 18 of my resource repository. Once you generate some ideas, you could post them publicly, integrate them into your own work, engage with organizations to advance related policy solutions, or even try to start an initiative focused on this particular problem.

Continue formal or informal education

In CDR, we often talk about immediate impact. How can we hit that cost target next year? How can we scale to hundreds of millions of tons by 2030? However, one way or another, scaling CDR will be a decades-long endeavor and one that may even continue beyond the end of the century. Some readers will spend their entire careers, which could be decades upon decades, working on CDR. Considering this, small investments in your education today could make a massive difference when aggregated across all the time you will be working.

We also live in a nonlinear world where the impact of decisions is distributed in a tremendously unequal way. One decision or finding made by one person in the right place at the right time could make a marginal difference of tens of millions of tons removed. In this sense, it could be worthwhile for one to spend years or even decades preparing for this one moment.

While we need to be careful about taking this argument to an extreme, it stands that investments in education—either formal or informal—can have a tremendous payoff. This applies whether you are still in high school or have worked in industry for 30 years. With things evolving as quickly as they are, you need to continuously educate yourself to stay current with emerging topics.

Leveling up your knowledge about CDR or needed skill sets can range from something short and sweet, like AirMiners Bootup and reading some Substack publications like The Carbon Curve or Carbon Removal Updates, to longer-term endeavors like pursuing a master’s in carbon management or a PhD.

Conduct small experiments

We do not yet know what the optimal portfolio of CDR solutions is. It is also unlikely that we have discovered all the individual methods and strategies that we will need to optimally achieve gigaton scale. To hedge against the risk of any approach not working out, we need many different individuals and organizations taking diverse actions and conducting small experiments in CDR. These small actions might just turn into the next big solution.

Psychologist Rachel Kaplan has written about the value of small experiments in environmental research. We often engage in these experiments in our personal lives when we trial a new routine or product before committing to it, and this same approach has value for more serious and professional matters. These experiments do not consume substantial amounts of resources by their nature but still involve a disciplined and planned approach. Dissemination of the results to others is a crucial aspect of this approach to avoid redundancy across efforts and promote collective learning. Both failures and successes should be documented, studied, and communicated, although it must be acknowledged that failures may result from poor timing or implementation as opposed to fundamental issues with the idea.

This approach is related to the hits-based model, used in venture capital and sometimes in philanthropy, which involves betting on a diverse number of opportunities in order to reap outsized returns from only a small fraction of the overall portfolio. Given the frequency of power laws versus bell curves in reality, this model can be extremely powerful for enabling high-impact solutions that might not be implemented otherwise.

For CDR, small experiments could include starting a discussion group, writing an article, exploring an idea for a new business or nonprofit, doing a literature review on an interesting topic, or developing a new policy idea. Anything that could start small but turn into something major is worth at least an initial investigation. You never know where it might lead.

On the job for victory

There is overlap between some of these recommendations. For example, if you were to develop a meaningful policy idea for mitigating the moral hazard, you could communicate that to a politician through a group such as OpenAir. Creating impactful communication materials for CDR could be part of encouraging your organization to start buying credits. And so forth.

You should not limit yourself to the ideas proposed here. These are merely a starting point to kickstart your thinking and provide initial scaffolding for a more structured personal strategy for advancing CDR.

Scaling responsible CDR is an all-hands-on-deck effort. This challenge spans from molecules to meteorology, from days to decades, and from science to supply chain. Just like conventional emissions reduction, success will require a wide diversity of people and organizations taking an even wider diversity of approaches.

This article is also published on Carbon-Based Commentary. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.