Carbon removals: the key to unlocking net zero

Dominique Barker: Welcome to The Sustainability Agenda, a podcast series focusing on the evolving complexities of the sustainability landscape with a view on addressing current issues in a concise format to help you navigate and take action. I’m your host, Dominique Barker. Please join me as we explore today’s most pressing matters with special guests that will give you some new perspective and help you make sense of what really matters.

Dominique Barker: So maybe you can end off talking about the woolly pigs that you talked about in your TED Talk. Tell us about those and how they’re involved in carbon removal.

Gabrielle Walker: I was trying to figure out how to tell the story of carbon removals to people who are feeling either confused or suspicious about it and also getting frustrated at the way that, this kind of, is it nature, or is it tech?

Dominique Barker: Good day. We’re pleased to welcome Dr. Gabrielle Walker. Dr. Walker has been working for decades on the climate challenge and works as an advisor at the boardroom level with a wide range of global companies. In founding her company, Valence Solutions, Dr. Walker brought together a team with decades of corporate expertise and deep personal commitment to accelerating action on the climate crisis. And I’ve seen it in action. I met Dr. Walker at an event sponsored by Microsoft at COP26, which was a carbon removal workshop. I’m really pleased to welcome her today. Dr. Walker is the author of several books, including co-authoring The Hot Topic, How to Avoid Global Warming While Still Keeping the Lights On. She has a PhD from Cambridge and has taught at both Cambridge and Princeton universities and she’s just given a great TED Talk. I’m going to highly recommend it. We’re going to include a link in our show notes. It’s been seen over a million times and it’s on carbon removals, the topic for today. So as you can imagine, I’m very pleased to be welcoming Dr. Walker to The Sustainability Agenda. Welcome.

Gabrielle Walker: Thank you. Very happy to be here.

Dominique Barker: So let’s start with a bit of an overview for our audience today. Could you define carbon removals, why we need them and why now?

Gabrielle Walker: So very simply, carbon removals are taking CO2 out of the sky and putting them somewhere where they stay. It’s as simple as that. And why do we need them right now? I was actually shocked to discover this. I’ve been working on climate change for, wow, nearly three decades and really most of that time has been focused on reducing emissions, stopping CO2 from getting into the sky in the first place and something that we still need to have to do and put a lot of effort into. But what I discovered is we’ve now left it too late. If we want to have even a fighting chance of sticking to 1.5 degrees and getting to net zero by 2050, we have to have a large amount of carbon removals. And in fact, the Energy Transition Commission has just calculated that that means a cumulative amount of carbon removals between now and 2050 of somewhere between 70 and brace yourself, 220 billion tons that we have to take out of the sky and put somewhere safe. And just by comparison, today we’re doing it for about 80,000. So there’s a very, very big increase that we’re going to have to do.

Dominique Barker: Our audience will have heard me use this number before, but I always like to remind everyone. Today the world produces about 50 billion metric tons of carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions annually. So that’s what we’re producing annually. But I think what you’re saying, Dr. Walker, is that in addition, we need to bring that down to zero, but we also need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Is that correct?

Gabrielle Walker: That’s exactly it. And so as well as getting those emissions down to zero, we now need to start taking it back out of the sky, cleaning up the mess we’ve made. In fact, you know, that’s the disheartening reason is that we’ve left it too late and so we have to take a large amount out. But the more heartening reason is that once we do that, we can keep going. If we really get this industry underway, we can keep going. And that means we can actually start to reverse climate change and clean up the mess we’ve made. And, you know, 1.5 degrees is still a disaster. We’re already experiencing the floods and fires and storms, but even less than that is bringing to us. And so one of the things about carbon removals is we don’t just need them to get down to net zero. They’re the only chance we have of actually cleaning up the mess and fixing this problem and giving the world a chance to heal.

Dominique Barker: Right. So could you talk about how carbon removal and carbon reduction work together? We’ve heard the comment before that carbon removal could take the pressure off big emitters to decarbonize. Can you just talk us through that problem?

Gabrielle Walker: Yeah, it’s the first thing that people often say whenever I talk about carbon removals and it’s a very visceral fear and it’s one that I understand. And the argument is that if we even start talking about carbon removals, people will say, oh, that’s okay, then I can just carry on as I’m going. I don’t need to reduce anything and we can just remove it all, fine. And I completely get that, they call it the moral hazard. One thing is that in order for us to get to net zero, we have to do two things. We have to reduce our emissions, that 50 billion tons that we’re putting into the sky every year, we have to reduce it as fast as humanly possible, throwing every possible technology in every possible approach that we’ve got. There’s no substitute for that. And on top of that, we need to do, as I just said, something around the order of 200 billion tons of carbon removals. Now, the more we don’t do the reductions, the more removals we’ll have to do. And so that’s how they sort of go hand in hand. And I’m a very big fan of having two targets to say, okay, we’re targeting this amount of reduction and this amount of removals and we’re treating them separately but connected, so that that means that you don’t actually have that moral hazard. Just one other thing to say about that, which is that there are people who are afraid that if you, if you sort of say, oh, well, it’s all right, you can just remove it. But carbon removals are very expensive. I’m not talking about kind of $15 a ton offsets. These can be anything up to $1,000 a ton. So saying, oh, well, people would just take that as an excuse not to have to reduce doesn’t add up in terms of economics. It’s always going to be cheaper to stop the emission getting into the air than it is to take it back out again. The point is that we now have to do both.

Dominique Barker: Great, and maybe you can talk us through the differences between nature based solutions and technology based solutions. And I think I’ve heard you describe them as green versus chrome. Could you give us some examples of their relative advantages?

Gabrielle Walker: Sure. So I’m first going to say if you do go and see my TED Talk, you’ll see that this is one of my biggest bugbears all the way through it because I keep on coming up against this. It’s kind of, I like nature, but I don’t like machines or I like tech, but I don’t like nature. And there are advantages to both sides. But the real truth is you can store carbon in so many different places. That distinction doesn’t make sense. You can store carbon in soils, you can store it in trees, you can store it in the ocean chemistry, you can store it in buildings, you can store it in rocks, you can store in wood that you spread onto fields. You can store it in deep geological formations. And all of those need some combination of human ingenuity and technology and natural resources. So I don’t think this whole green versus chrome even makes sense. What’s more interesting and important is to say what are the approaches that mean that the carbon actually stays put? And one of the issues, for example, with a lot of the approaches to putting carbon in soils is that as a sequestration tool, it’s not brilliant because you get the soil to take up more carbon and then you plough it and the carbon goes straight back into the sky. So we’ve got to be much cleverer about it than that and find ways to store the carbon where it stays. And you can do that in nature and you can also do that in rocks, and you can do that somewhere in between. And so, you know, I don’t think nature versus tech, green versus chrome is even useful. But I do think we need to be clever about where we put it and how we ensure it stays there.

Dominique Barker: Right. And I guess Microsoft actually just by chance, as we’re recording this, put out recently their updated lessons learned on carbon removal. And I would recommend, in fact we’ll put a link to the report in the show notes as well. And they talk about things like durability. Maybe you can define durability for our audience and talk about where carbon goes when it’s captured and how long it’s stored for.

Gabrielle Walker: Sure. So this is a really big and important issue. And Microsoft, to their credit, were one of the first companies to really realize this. And they have been a leader in this space. I mean, it’s been quite a while now since they announced that not only were there going to be negative emissions by 2030, but they were also then going to remove their historical emissions by 2050. So they’re the first major corporation that’s actually saying we’re not just going to stop the problem getting worse, we’re going to clean up the mess that we’ve left historically. And in that process, they are providing, I think, quite a leadership role. This issue about durability, it is just what I was saying about the different forms of removal. It’s not enough to say how much carbon did we take up? It’s how long does it stay. So, for example, Microsoft actually invested in reforestation and planting trees and that was terrific until the trees, some of them in the Pacific Northwest, you know what happened? They burned. And then the carbon just scraped back into the sky. So it’s not enough to plant trees. And by the way, it’s not enough to plant trees, you also have to make sure that you’re not messing up your biodiversity while you do it or you’re not messing up the land rights of the people who are also otherwise going to use that land for food. But you’ve got to be careful that there’s a really good chance that the trees will actually stay and not burn or be chopped down or have their CO2 in other ways go back into the sky. So this issue of durability, people used to talk about permanence, but nothing’s really permanent. And so the issue of durability is, it’s how long does it stay? It might be five years. It might be 30 years on average, it might be 50, it might be 100, it might be 1,000. Or in the case of the geological formations that you can put the CO2 in, it can be 10,000 years. I’m a bit of a fan of the geological formations just because I like the poetry of it. Basically what you do is you capture the CO2 from the air and you put it back where it came from. It’s like reversing the valve. I kind of like that. But all of these forms are going to have some role to play and they’re all going to have different durabilities. And so quite a few bodies now are saying, look, what you need to do is make sure you’ve got at least a durability of 100 years so that you can actually make sure that it stays long enough that we can carry on figuring out how to deal with this crisis.

Dominique Barker: Great. And in Canada, as you would know, we’ve been big producers of oil and gas, so we’ve got the rocks to be able to put all of this back. So I call it reverse mining. Put it back in the ground where-

Gabrielle Walker: Yes, exactly.

Dominique Barker: And hopefully export the carbon credits to others. So in your view, how important is the development of a carbon removal industry? I mean, I think we know, but maybe you could just describe that and how it can achieve scale.

Gabrielle Walker: So this is the real big one because as I said at the beginning, we’ve got roughly 80,000 tons a year of really high quality durable removals that can be measured and you can kind of lean on per year right now. When we get to 2050, we need of the order of 10 billion tons a year. By 2030, we need 100 million tons a year, that’s a calculation that the UN high level champions for climate action have made. So we need to go from 80,000 to 100 million in eight years and then we need to go from 100 million to 10 billion in the next 20 years. And so with that, that means what we’ve actually got, what we’re looking at is an exponential growth that’s needed starting now. So some people thinking about carbon removals have sort of said, oh, well, you know, let’s do everything else first. And then when we figure out what’s left and what residual emissions there are, we can then sort of have a look at it. But basically if we do that, there’s going to be no chance to get to the kind of scale that we’re talking about here. So what we have to do is start now and be doubling more or less every year. And if we double more or less every year, when we get to 2030, we’ll be of the order of 100 million. When we get to 2040 we’ll be at the gigaton scale. When we get to 2050, we can be at the ten gigaton scale. And the faster we can do it, the better. And so, you know, I think a lot of the questions around this industry, the people who have good ideas is an incredible appetite and energy among the venture capital world is incredibly exciting ecosystem of start-ups and brilliant ideas. And there’s much, much, much more demand than there is supply at the moment for really quality removals. So what’s interesting is we’re now doing, I formed a program called Rethinking Removals through my company Valence Solutions, and with various very brilliant partners. We’re actually figuring out what it’s going to take to be the connective tissue to help this industry scale at a rate that no industry has ever scaled before in human history. And what that’s going to take is eliminating duplication, making connections to people, joining dots when people aren’t talking right. When we talk to the providers, they say, we could scale, but we just don’t have the demand. When we talk to the people who are buying, they say, well, we could buy more, but there just isn’t supply. And when we talk to the people who are setting the standards, they say, well, theoretically it should be like this. And we talk to the people on the ground saying, well, we’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. And so I think that what it’s going to take to scale this is an awful lot more complex dialogues and collaborations and interconnections so that we can just eliminate all of that confusion and mess and get this going. And there’s one other thing that’s going to take the scale, by the way, which is probably even more important, which is just sorting out this utterly confused and broken narrative around carbon removals, the fears of what it could do, the confusion about the language. Is it nature based solution? Is that carbon capture and storage? Is it CDR? Is it GGR? Is it carbon credits? Is it voluntary? Is it compliance? Is it, there’s so much confusion and lack of clarity of thinking that I think that’s one of the biggest things that will actually help this to scale.

Dominique Barker: Well, and that’s the point of this podcast because I think education is key to understand some of these issues and it is such an important issue to develop and to scale these markets. And maybe a lot of our listeners are some of our corporate clients and our employees at CIBC. What advice would you give for companies that have set targets for carbon emission reduction?

Gabrielle Walker: Oh, that’s a great question. So at the moment, things are moving very fast. There’s a lot of conversations happening about what good looks like for a net zero plan and how to actually realize them. I think it’s beginning to dawn on a lot more companies, a lot more organizations and a lot more of the kind of the NGO bodies. The first step was to get those net zero targets in place and now almost nobody knows how to realize them. And so first of all, accept that this is a fast moving field, that a lot of things are changing very quickly. And so you really want to adopt no regrets strategies as you’re trying to navigate this. And I think within the next year and a half, especially if I and we do our job right, everything’s going to become a lot clearer. But there’s some things that is utterly clear that you can do as a no regrets policy. And the first thing is measure your emissions. Know what your emissions are in your own scope one and scope two, your own emissions associated with your own operations and your own emissions associated with the energy that you use. So once you’ve got that in play, you know how much you’re emitting. And then the second thing is, once you know how much you’re emitting, start a process of figuring out a plan for how you can reduce that as much as possible, as quickly as possible, actually have a plan. What in that could be reduced now with existing technologies or possibilities? What might require some developments? What energy efficiency possibilities are? What travel efficiency possibilities are there? But also, what might you look again in five years’ time to see? We want another 10% out of it. How would we do it? So, you know, let’s have a plan for reducing. And then the third thing, which is utterly no regrets, is have a plan for removing the rest. It’s not enough anymore in terms of net zero. It’s not enough anymore to say you might do some kind of avoidance offset or basically what goes up now must come down. And that’s utterly clear. So it’s basically figure out what you can reduce and then have a plan, start a sink fund to figure out how you can actually start to buy removals. And one thing about the removals industry that will really help it to scale is that the more organizations and the more companies that are actually showing the demand and willing to even pre-purchase to buy advance purchase credits, that’s what the providers are telling us will help them to scale. If they get advance purchases, they can then show that to the project financers. They can get the capital, they can build the plants that will enable them to do the removing. And so that, I think, is going to be the direction that this will go in. And then on top of that, you really want to be a leader in this field. That’s where the opportunity is to act within your value chain, work with your suppliers, your customers, and potentially outside your value chain come. And that’s where I think the voluntary carbon market and its possibilities for helping others to reduce where the possibilities for helping with adaptation, with biodiversity, all of those things that are ultimately going to be everybody’s problem. And you can demonstrate your leadership by acting on them now. But I tell you, any company that isn’t, doesn’t have a plan to reduce its emissions and remove the rest is not going to be able to get to net zero. And if you don’t have both a net zero commitment and a plan, you’re not any longer at the table. And you know what, Dominique? If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Dominique Barker: I like that expression. And I think one of the things that we always talk about is what gets measured, gets managed. So you said the first thing is to measure your emissions. And we saw in mid-March, the SEC came out with some disclosure recommendations on greenhouse gas emissions. And Canada is about to come out with its own national instrument on disclosure. And so what gets measured gets managed. So that is an important piece there.

Gabrielle Walker: There’s something else to look out for on that, which is that the ISSB. So this is a new body that was just announced at COP along with GFANZ, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. I think GFANZ is also a very interesting body because that’s put together the Net-Zero Asset Managers Initiative, the net zero asset owners alliance, the banking alliance have all gone together. And then so the ISSB, I think is going to be very interesting because they’re going to consolidate with two other bodies that were also trying to figure out how you should make your disclosures. And I think by the end of this year, we should see much more from them about how this consolidation can happen and how we can get away from that, you know, alphabet soup of all of the different possible acronyms for how to disclose, I think that’s really going to get tidied up this year.

Dominique Barker: Oh, that would be terrific. So maybe you can end off talking about the woolly pigs that you talked about in your TED Talk. Tell us about those and how they’re involved in carbon removal.

Gabrielle Walker: I was trying to figure out how to tell the story of carbon removals to people who are feeling either confused or suspicious about it and also feeling frustrated at the way that, this kind of, is it nature or is it tech? Is it engineered or is it this? And I went to visit. I was walking in the Scottish Highlands. I sometimes like to go on long walks and I realized I wasn’t very far away from the Isle of Mull and I’d been corresponding with a guy there who was actually doing a whole bunch of carbon removals on the Isle of Mull. So I called him up and said, can I come visit? And he said, sure. And I spent a very beautiful, unusually sunny day on the Isle of Mull. Actually, it’s usually rainy there, but I got a glorious sunny day. And the first thing that we did when I went to see this guy, it’s the Future Forest Company, but they’ve moved beyond just trees. And so the first thing he did is he took me to see his woolly pigs. Now they are gorgeous creatures. They are also, it turns out, the closest you can get to a native Scottish wild boar without having to have a dangerous animal’s license, which is why they had them there. They’re very kind of woolly and furry and they’re also very beautiful, if you like, that kind of thing, which I do. But what they’re there for is that that whole area has been subjected to selective grazing. And so it had head high bracken, the only thing that the sheep left behind. So they moved the sheep away, but they had to get rid of the bracken. So they send in the woolly pigs. The woolly pigs rootle everything up, get rid of all the bracken and start to lift the seed bed up from underneath in the soil. So natural trees, the native trees can actually start to grow there. And as those native trees start to grow and they’ve got the land in perpetuity and it’s pretty wet there, so they’re not going to burn, that starts to take up carbon from the sky. So that’s the first step. And they’re also planting trees, deliberately planting native broadleaf trees there, helping with biodiversity as well. So that’s the second step that’s so far so natural. But they also have wood offcuts that they’re burning in the absence of oxygen, and that’s called paralyzing and that creates a thing called biochar, which they then plough into the fields and that improves the quality of the soil. And you know what takes up more carbon that stays. It stays locked up into the wood because of the way that they burn it. And they’ve also got machines. They’re quarrying in the local quarry and they’ve got basalt rock that they’re grinding up and spreading on the fields, and that basalt rock is taking up CO2 from the air. So basically you’ve got the woolly pig’s rootling, you’ve got the trees growing, you’ve got the wood cooking, you’ve got the rocks grinding. And all of those are different approaches to taking up carbon from the air and putting it somewhere where it’s going to stay. And I tell you what, Dominique, I sat on that hillside and I’ve been working on climate change for so long and so much of it seems so hard and impossible. And I work with businesses and I heard the same thing. I’ve heard it from CEOs as much as I’ve heard it from teenagers. Everyone’s feeling despair. And I sat on that hillside and I looked at all of that and I thought, you know what? We can do this. And I felt hope. So that’s what the woolly pigs did for me.

Dominique Barker: Well, that is an excellent way to end today’s podcast. Thank you very much for your time. I think two things really stood out for me. I mean, there are lots that stood out, but the concept of collaboration, we continue to hear how important that is and coordination to get this going and education. And so thank you for helping to educate our audience today on the importance of carbon removals and the importance to scale it. Thank you for your expertise and thank you for your leadership in this space, Dr. Walker.

Gabrielle Walker: Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure.

Dominique Barker: Please join us next time as we tackle some of sustainability’s biggest questions providing different perspectives to help you move forward. I’m your host, Dominique Barker, and this is The Sustainability Agenda.

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