Thinking about carbon dioxide like an accountant

Because the atmosphere doesn't care where the carbon dioxide came from

Say you’re the chief sustainability officer for United Airlines. Or Lafarge, the French cement giant. Or Nippon Steel. Or basically any big polluter in a sector where abating emissions is difficult.

You have a bunch of engineers working for you, and part of their job is calculating what it will take to abate your climate emissions. Because you’re in a hard-to-abate industry, the costs they’re going to report to you are going to be high — that’s sort of the definition of hard-to-abate. In aviation, the marginal cost of lowering emissions comes in around $300-$400 per ton of CO₂ — which is a lot because, well, Sustainable Aviation Fuel prices are sort of murder.

In cement, you’re looking at sort of the $80-$240 range per ton for CCS, depending on a whole lot of factors. In steel, you’re again looking at sort of $90-$200 per ton or so. These are the marginal costs of abating the next ton of CO₂ — the average costs of abating your entire carbon footprint would certainly be higher.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say in your company, the engineers tell you the marginal cost of abating the next ton is $100. And let’s say your sustainability budget also happens to be $100.

Now, say you look at the offset market, and an entrant has figured out technology for a high quality, long-term ton of carbon dioxide removal that costs $50. What should you do?

Well, you could say your primary responsibility is for your company’s own emissions, so you’re going to abate those first. You could spend your $100 budget abating one ton of CO₂. Of course, that means you don’t pay that new CDR company $100 to draw down two tons of CO₂. The opportunity cost of your decision, then, is to leave one ton of CO₂ in the atmosphere that you could have taken out of it.

Is this reasonable environmental stewardship?

I don’t think it is. I think if you’re really focused on carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, the logical thing to do is to buy the offsets. Given your budget constraint, economic rationality demands that you focus your resources on the pathway that will have the greatest impact.

The logic of this seems, to me, fairly obvious. And yet when I tell people I’m working on low-cost carbon dioxide removal options, one of the objections I hear most often is “but isn’t that just giving polluters an excuse not to decarbonize?”

Now in the carbon removal world, the standard reply to that objection is “no of course we know we need to decarbonize. We’re not proposing an alternative to decarbonization, we’re proposing an addition to it.” Which, I think, sounds nice and makes you come across as environmentally conscious and respectable and solidly within-the-consensus.

But more and more, I find myself questioning that answer. Because it is economically illiterate.

The atmosphere, for its part, is entirely indifferent between a ton of carbon dioxide that’s been removed and one that was never emitted in the first place. It’s not that one has a bigger impact than the other. It’s the overall level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that causes warming: a ton is a ton is a ton.

If you accept that, you come to see that the insistence on prioritizing emissions reductions over carbon removal is entirely arbitrary: more an expression of a kind of free-floating hostility to industrial civilization than anything you can really defend on climate terms.

What the world needs now is a $10 ton of safe, long-term carbon dioxide removal. Once we have a truly low-cost, high-quality, scalable technology for taking carbon out of the atmosphere, some things that are now obscure will become crystal clear. If we had a $10 ton, then abating all 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide we’re now emitting each year would become a $400 billion a year proposition.

That’s a lot of money, yes, but it’s not actually that much money in the scheme of things.

Total current spending on climate mitigation and adaptation has been estimated at north of $1 trillion. Which means if we had a $10 ton of removals, we would be able to save $600 billion a year and actually reach Net Zero, rather than what we’re doing now, which is spending more than twice that much without actually solving the problem.

Look, I know there are powerful conventions preventing us from really developing this kind of reasoning. I understand it makes people uncomfortable. I get it that emissions reductions have been fetishized to such an extent that people see punishing polluters as a kind of inherent goal of climate policy.

But this has it backwards. United Airlines doesn’t pollute a lot because they’re bad people, they pollute a lot because you and I want to fly in airplanes. Lafarge doesn’t pollute a lot because they’re irredeamable fat cats, they pollute a lot because you and I demand infrastructure that can only be built with cement. Nippon Steel doesn’t pollute a lot because they’re indifferent to the environment, they pollute a lot because every day of the year you and I use things that can only be made with steel.

Emissions are there because you and I benefit from products and services that generate emissions.

My focus is on carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. If we recenter the climate debate on what actually matters to the climate, we’ll see clearly that there’s more than one way to bring those concentrations down. We’ll accept the obvious reality that our willingness to pay to abate climate change is limited, and that when your resources are limited rationality demands that you concentrate them on their most efficient uses.

Which is why developing a long-duration, low-cost method of capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is where our focus should be as climate activist. The rest might make us feel good, but it won’t make a difference.