Since last year’s landmark climate legislation, members of congress are looking for niche areas of climate progress. Enter the Carbon Removal and Emissions Storage Technologies (CREST) Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation aimed at accelerating carbon removal and storage solutions. 

It was introduced by U.S. Senators Susan Collins and Maria Cantwell and also has a bipartisan version in the House, the CREST Act tasks the Departments of Energy with initiating research programs and exploring the feasibility of a number of carbon removal pathways.

The legislation focuses on several carbon removal techniques, such as biomass-based removal, ocean CDR, and DAC and geologic storage. A wide swath of organizations, including many familiar to the CDR industry like Clearpath, Stripe, and Vesta, have signed a letter of support. 

In this episode, we going to delve into the details of the CREST Act, its potential impact on our climate, and the implications of its bipartisan support. Will it help scale up a domestic CDR industry? How will the Act's pilot reverse auction purchasing program facilitate the commercialization of carbon removal?

We’ll also take a look at the recent developments at the UNFCCC and their work on revising Article 6.4. The tone of their first draft has attracted a lot of attention and controversy for the way it characterized CDR. 

Joining our policy panel are two experts in the field of carbon removal: Savita Bowman,  Program Manager at ClearPath, who works on organization's carbon dioxide removal initiatives, and Holly Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo and author of “Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net-Zero is Not Enough”.

On This Episode

Holly Jean Buck

Savita Bowman

Asa Kamer

Resources

CREST Act

CREST Support Letter

Article 6.4 draft Note

Connect with Nori

Nori

Nori’s Twitter

Nori’s other podcast Reversing Climate Change

Nori’s CDR meme twitter account