Companies are increasingly turning to newfangled ways to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as a way to hit their sustainability goals. But who’s watching to make sure these tactics are working? A new project called the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative (CRSI) launched today, with the goal of helping develop standards for efforts to draw down and sequester CO2. It comes as big names in tech scale-up investments in carbon dioxide removal (CDR), even though there are still concerns about whether those technologies will be able to prove themselves at commercial scale.
Who’s watching to make sure these tactics are working? CDR can look like many different things — building an industrial facility to filter CO2 out of the air or seawater, for instance. While they can sound green on paper, there’s a danger that all the carbon accounting won’t add up enough to help stop climate change. Those new industrial facilities use a lot of energy, for example, and the carbon they capture could potentially be used to produce more oil and gas. There isn’t much oversight yet to make sure new projects are making good on their claims.
Carbon dioxide removal encompasses a suite of strategies to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These technologies could potentially help slow climate change by trapping some of the pollution fossil fuels have already released over the years. There are still concerns about its costs, safety, and potential to delay a transition from fossil fuels to carbon pollution-free energy. Experts say carbon removal is no substitute for preventing greenhouse gas emissions in the first place. Policymakers are still trying to catch up with all these new technologies.
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