Executive Summary
Calls for greater government involvement in carbon dioxide removal (CDR) usually resolve into a familiar list: fund more research, establish standards, create incentives, regulate markets, build infrastructure. All of these actions will be necessary. But history suggests scaling CDR to climate-relevant levels will also require something much larger: governments gradually building an entire social, financial, administrative and physical architecture around the undertaking, while accepting responsibility for an outcome that cannot safely be left to markets or individual action alone.
The histories of oil and waste management illustrate two different but complementary ways this can happen. Oil began as a valuable commercial product, driven largely by private entrepreneurship, but governments repeatedly helped create the conditions for expansion—building enabling infrastructure such as roads and ports, supporting research and strategic supply, shaping trade and investment conditions, and helping close virtuous cycles in which larger markets justified better infrastructure and better infrastructure enlarged markets further. None of this is to suggest that CDR should retrace oil’s history, which also brought profound environmental damage, geopolitical conflict and social disruption. The broader lesson is that sustained government-market cooperation can transform an emerging technology into a civilization-scale system. CDR can learn from that achievement while proceeding with the safeguards, scrutiny and due diligence needed to avoid repeating oil’s mistakes.
Waste management followed a different path. As cities grew, societies eventually stopped treating waste as a problem individuals and markets could be expected to solve on their own. Governments accepted civic responsibility for the outcome and built the financing systems, infrastructure, public authorities, regulations and administrative capacity needed to make reliable sanitation possible. Private enterprise remained essential, but commercial demand no longer determined whether the underlying problem would be addressed. Society decided that it had to be.
CDR will likely need both models. Governments can aggressively nurture technologies, markets and commercial uses for captured carbon, creating virtuous cycles that attract investment, reduce costs and allow private industry to shoulder as much of the task as possible. At the same time, governments must be prepared to ensure that necessary carbon removal occurs even where no self-sustaining market emerges. Doing this at enormous scale will require much more than good CDR policy. New financing mechanisms, institutions, legal authorities, coordinating bodies, liability systems, infrastructure, permitting processes, public engagement and other forms of administrative capacity will have to develop alongside the technologies themselves.
None of this will emerge from a single master plan. Oil and waste management developed iteratively over generations as experience revealed new possibilities, new problems and new institutional needs. CDR will have to undergo much the same process, but on a radically compressed timetable. Governments will need to learn quickly, tolerate some dead ends, share lessons across jurisdictions, and overcome political and perceptual barriers that make climate action especially difficult. The objective is not to prescribe a single global CDR system, but to begin building the capacity for societies to discover what works.
The central lesson from history, then, is not that government or markets should lead CDR. We will need both, working together at a depth and scale that today’s CDR landscape only begins to approximate. Governments can accept responsibility for solving the carbon dioxide problem while simultaneously mobilizing markets, capital, technology and industry to help solve it. We cannot yet know exactly what institutional system will result. But if CDR is to reach climate-relevant scale within the next few decades, the process of building that system needs to begin now.
This article was written by Glenn Hampson, CDRANet program director and Vancouver Secretariat Interim Director.
Photo credits: Top photo is a Lower East Side street scene from the New York City Department of Sanitation, glass negative no. 693, ca. 1900. Courtesy of the Municipal Archives, City of New York. Main post photo is a New York City Department of Street Cleaning cart, 1908, from the New York City Municipal Archives, Department of Street Cleaning Photograph Collection.