Carbon Removal as Essential American Infrastructure
The few beams of carbon dioxide removal federal policy peeking through the clouds.
This is a summary of episode 395 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your shows. You can also listen to the full episode right below this paragraph.
Quick Takeaways
Carbon removal received over $125 million in FY26 appropriations, including $80 million for DOE research and development and $45 million for the CDR purchase pilot prize. This was about $125 million more than anyone expected.
The Carbon Removal Alliance tripled its Republican congressional meetings in one year, going from 5 to 17, in what Eli describes as a harder political moment. The key: framing carbon removal as industrial policy, not climate policy.
Every single carbon removal company in CRA’s membership is deploying in partnership with industrial players. Enhanced rock weathering saves farmers money. Carbon mineralization reduces mining waste. BECCS generates energy. The industrial integration story is not hypothetical.
45Q was one of the only energy tax credits to not only survive but get expanded in the reconciliation package, largely because of its association with industries like oil and gas and the bipartisan coalition behind it.
The EPA’s EMRTAI program, a small initiative for innovative mining technologies on waste material, is being expanded to include carbon removal pilots. This could give mineralization companies access to feedstocks and pilot sites the mining sector has been too risk-averse to offer on its own.
The Soothing Rhetorical Embrace of the Second Tallest Man in Carbon Removal
I have been, by my own admission on this show, a bit of a chicken little lately. The federal policy landscape for carbon removal looks bad if you’re reading headlines. I said as much in a recent episode and meant it. So I asked Eli Cain, Deputy Director of Policy at the Carbon Removal Alliance, to come on and tell me where I’m wrong.
He did.
The conversation that followed was one of those episodes that genuinely recalibrated how I think about what’s happening in Washington. Not because Eli is naive about the difficulties, but because his organization is doing the kind of granular, meeting-by-meeting, policy-by-policy work that doesn’t make headlines but determines outcomes.
The numbers no one is talking about
The headline number is $125 million. That is what carbon removal received in FY26 appropriations, passed in January. It broke down to $80 million for research and development at the Department of Energy and $45 million for the CDR purchase pilot prize. Eli was quick to point out that this was roughly $125 million more than anyone expected, and that it didn’t happen by accident. Organizations like the CRA spend nearly a year working on appropriations, communicating the importance of these programs to Congress.
What struck me about this number is how little attention it got. The narrative in our industry has been dominated by what’s being cut, what’s being frozen, what’s under threat. And all of that is real. But $125 million materialized through a process that most people in carbon removal don’t track closely, and the people who made it happen did so through the unsexy work of showing up to offices and explaining why it mattered.
Selling carbon removal without saying “climate”
The CRA held its annual fly-in day a few weeks before we recorded, bringing carbon removal members to DC for 34 congressional meetings. Last year they had about 5 meetings with Republicans. This year, 17. That shift didn’t happen because Republicans suddenly got excited about climate policy. It happened because the CRA got smarter about how it frames what carbon removal actually does.
The framing that works right now is industrial policy. Enhanced rock weathering saves farmers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on soil amendments and improves yields. You can walk into a congressional office and talk about supporting American agriculture without ever uttering the word “emissions.” Carbon mineralization reduces the volume of toxic waste at mine sites, destroys asbestos fibers, and helps extract critical minerals from legacy waste piles. BECCS literally generates energy while removing carbon. These are not hypothetical co-benefits. Every single CRA member company is deploying in partnership with industrial players. Every one.
Eli put it simply: “We are a climate solution. We just happen to have really tangible industrial benefits as well.” The trick is knowing which part of that sentence to lead with, depending on the room.
Two tracks, one destination
What I found most clarifying about Eli’s description of their strategy was the explicit two-track structure. On one hand, there’s the near-term pragmatic work: appropriations, expanding existing EPA programs, building an enhanced rock weathering research network with Cascade Climate. These are winnable policies that keep companies alive and preserve the progress of the last decade. On the other hand, there’s the long-term coalition building for the big swings, the kind of market-shaping policy that takes years to develop and a broad political coalition to pass.
Eli pointed out that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act took roughly 20 years from concept to passage if you trace the core ideas back to the Obama administration. That kind of timescale requires both patience and the discipline to not put all your eggs in the big-swing basket while companies are struggling today.
The 45Q signal
One of the most telling indicators Eli highlighted was the fate of 45Q in the reconciliation process. It was one of the only energy tax credits to not only survive but actually get expanded. That happened because of its association with industries like oil and gas and the bipartisan support that had been built around it. It’s a useful proof point for the CRA’s thesis: durable policy is bipartisan policy, and the way you make climate policy bipartisan is by embedding it in things both sides already care about.
A note on pragmatism and values
I brought up something Aaron Burns from Carbon 180 had said on a previous episode about not wanting to cede rhetorical ground by downplaying the climate motivations behind carbon removal. Eli’s response was diplomatic but clear. The CRA’s approach isn’t about changing what they believe. It’s about meeting offices where they are and introducing carbon removal through whatever door is already open. If that door is agriculture, you talk about farmers. If it’s mining, you talk about waste reduction. The underlying commitment to carbon removal as a climate solution doesn’t change, but the pitch does.
I think there’s real wisdom in both approaches, and the tension between them is productive rather than destructive. You need people holding the line on why this work matters. You also need people walking into offices with farm data and getting $125 million.
Not out of the woods
Eli didn’t try to tell me everything is fine. The administration remains something of a black box for existing programs like the DAC Hubs. The farm bill is uncertain. The broader political landscape for environmental policy is genuinely difficult. But the story Eli told is one of a field that is learning to operate in the political environment that actually exists rather than the one it wishes existed.
You trim your sails to the winds that exist, not the ones you wish existed. That’s not a famous quote. It’s just something I said in the intro to this episode. But it captures what I took away from this conversation. The Carbon Removal Alliance is doing the hard, boring, creative work of making carbon removal legible to a political system that doesn’t owe it anything. And it appears to be working.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You like Cain, the second tallest person in carbon removal? Hello?
Eli Cain: Yeah. Actually, I’m quite proud of that fact. So thank you for introducing me that way.
Ross Kenyon: Number one, the current champion, Matt Plasik. Hope you’re listening, Matt. We love you.
Eli Cain: Yeah, no, I don’t see him getting beat anytime soon, but second place is still a significant honor.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. I’m really happy to have you on Eli. Thanks for doing the difficult work of staying on top of federal policy in a time that I think to people who are not in DC and not the specific kind of nerd that wants to read policy briefs and a thousand pages of legislation and stuff like that, it looks grim. But your organization, the Carbon Removal Alliance, does not think it’s as grim as maybe I presented in a recent podcast. There’s some green shoots. There’s things that are happening that I need to be reminded of. So if you listen to my very depressing “Oh God, this macro stuff is not looking good,” can you help me? Can you boom me back up?
Eli Cain: So as you mentioned, we are focused at the federal level in the US and our work has changed over the last year and a half since the inauguration, but we’re still really bullish on US federal policy, and that continues to be our focal area for many reasons. Maybe it’s worth taking a step back and reorienting around what has happened over the last year and what we’ve currently seen in 2026.
Ross Kenyon: Gosh, how could you possibly do an effective job at all that’s happened in this time, but yes, take a stab at it. Please, please tell me. Recap it.
Eli Cain: Yeah, so even just in 2026, we’ve seen what I would consider pretty significant positive indicators for carbon removal policy at the federal level. So every year, ideally every year, although sometimes this gets a little funky because policy is always a little funky, we go through the annual appropriations process. This is when the US federal government and its agencies sets discretionary budget levels. In other words, this is how a lot of the federal government gets funded.
Ross Kenyon: Is this what’s happening now with the DHS stuff, that there’s no agreement? Is that part of appropriations?
Eli Cain: It is not. That’s on the non-discretionary spending side. And for FY26, this wrapped up in January and now we’re going through that process for fiscal year 2027. But in January they released the FY26 appropriations bills that outlined how most federal agencies would be funded, and included in that, carbon removal got over $125 million. That was about $125 million more than anyone kind of expected. And we were really excited about that. And that was broken down through several different programs, but it included $80 million for research and development at the Department of Energy, $45 million for a continuation of the CDR purchase pilot prize, which is one of the programs I got to run. And these are really important, really critical policies for the carbon removal industry in the US. And that didn’t happen by accident. Organizations like mine and others in the space spend nearly a year working on appropriations and communicating the importance of that within Congress. But that was a hugely impactful thing that no one’s really talking about in the US policy space. So that’s certainly one thing that we’re excited about.
Ross Kenyon: Even just hearing those numbers, I’m already feeling some of the endorphins flooding my bloodstream, returning to hale and hardy health now. How does this work with the various members of Congress who are doing this work where I think there’s been an assumption that’s been challenged pretty recently around Trump’s control of Republican legislators, and that he actually had them pretty well, like this is what I want to do, this is the priority, make the SAVE Act happen, this is what I want. And especially with Iran, we’re seeing more people break. Then again, we also saw some really strong breaks with the Epstein files too. It isn’t nearly as controlled by the White House as maybe meets the eye. And are we seeing places where there’s just like, this is in my backyard, this is in my district, these are jobs, there are good reasons to do this, there’s a plug into oil and gas in a favorable way. What are the things that are making this happen? What are the politics that make individuals want to stand up for this in a time when you would expect them to say yeah, $0 instead of $125 million?
Eli Cain: Yeah, that is a really good question and one we think a lot about. And I think the answer is as nuanced as you could expect. It really varies congressional member by congressional member. And one thing I’d highlight is that just a few weeks ago, we brought all carbon removal members down to Washington DC for what we call our annual fly-in day, where we had 34 congressional meetings to talk about our appropriations requests. And when we did this last year, we had about five Republican meetings, which was a good number considering how carbon removal was portrayed as a climate solution.
Ross Kenyon: Both houses of Congress?
Eli Cain: Both houses.
Ross Kenyon: Okay.
Eli Cain: This year we had 17 Republican meetings.
Ross Kenyon: How many are you able to say? How many senators and how many congressmen and women?
Eli Cain: Yeah, it is usually roughly evenly split between the two. And we target different members depending on the policy we’re working on. But this year we had 17 Republican meetings and so we went from five last year to 17. And this is in a harder political moment, and I think it underscores the fact that our messaging around carbon removal has gotten a lot smarter and the policies we’re working on have gotten more targeted. And because of that, we’re able to reach new offices that have never heard of carbon removal before and might not even be on the side of the aisle that we would expect.
Ross Kenyon: Give me a little taste of that. What’s a message that you’re noticing is working really well in this political moment?
Eli Cain: Yeah. Anyone who’s tapped into US policy in general will notice that a key theme is around industrial policy, whether that is critical mineral extraction and shoring up our domestic supply chains of critical minerals, which has been a bipartisan priority since the Clinton administration, or artificial intelligence or agriculture or steel. These are the themes that we’ve really seen over the last year and those are the themes that we can tap into for carbon removal in a really effective way. And we’ve had this thesis for years at the Carbon Removal Alliance, but when you look across our membership and you say, how are people actually deploying carbon removal today? Every single carbon removal company in our membership is deploying in partnership with industrial players.
Ross Kenyon: Every one.
Eli Cain: Every one.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Okay.
Eli Cain: And that is a really important fact and a really important thesis for the long-term durability of carbon removal policy. Maybe a few tangible examples that we can point to. Enhanced rock weathering is integration into agriculture, right? We know it as a climate solution, but it’s also a solution that can save farmers hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on critical soil amendments. That is a narrative that really sells. You can walk into an office and say you have farmers in your district who are working with enhanced rock weathering companies. It saves them hundreds of thousands of dollars every year and it improves their yields. That is a bipartisan message that resonates despite the political climate, and we have many more examples of that. And so happy to chat a little bit more about the specific policies. The other one that we’re really excited about is the integration of mineralization technologies into the domestic mining sector, and I really think it’s kind of this unicorn opportunity where we have a carbon removal solution with huge potential for scale in mineralization, while at the same time it can make it easier to extract critical minerals from legacy waste piles and have environmental remediation benefits. There’s not an office that isn’t interested in those things, and so we can talk about carbon removal as part of a broader suite of industrial policy and talk about carbon removal as essential American infrastructure. That’s the message that has really resonated.
Ross Kenyon: How fascinating. When you’re in these meetings, do you ever wish that your organization was named something else or do you not feel like it’s harming you?
Eli Cain: You know, I think it is a, I know it is a tongue in cheek question, but it is something we think about both because carbon is a relatively clear indicator of where we stand. But we also are not shy about why we do the work we do. And we need to remember that carbon removal is a climate solution at the end of the day. And so we don’t lie about what carbon removal is and is not. We are a climate solution. We just happen to have really tangible industrial benefits as well. And we can talk about those in these audiences as well.
Ross Kenyon: I have another tongue in cheek one for you. Are you ready for it?
Eli Cain: Oh yeah.
Ross Kenyon: How much is this work like Veep?
Eli Cain: Yeah, it’s simply the best show of all time. And I think every time I come back from DC I binge it again because you’re like, oh my God, I have such a deep appreciation for it now. It is and it isn’t, as with all things. I haven’t worked on the Hill. We have members of our team who spent over a decade on the Hill. And so they are the ones who eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Capitol Hill and know everybody and know how to get things passed, which is very central to our thesis as the Carbon Removal Alliance. We’re not a think tank. We don’t write policy papers that are designed only to be digested by the carbon removal field. Everything we do is designed with a lens towards passage and implementation. And so we have the people who know how to get that done. And so some of it’s like that, but I think it’s about being creative is what I would say. It’s finding the creative ways to message to the right people at the right times.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. The thing that I’ve always noticed with working with Gianna or just knowing people involved in Carbon 180 for a long time and CRA is that people who are serious about politics enough to make it their career in DC, they’re very practical people. And I studied political philosophy and did PhD work in it. And that type of politics that’s closely linked to the world of ideas finds politics almost inherently frustrating because you know that you have to be practical and cut deals and meet people where they are. And that can sometimes be really frustrating for someone who cares about philosophy. But it sounds like you have found your way in. It may not be your preferred way in. You found a way in. You guys are getting these meetings across the aisle and stuff is happening because you found a story in a political economy that just kind of makes sense for everyone. What’s that like? Are you just happy that the result happens? You don’t really care that much about the exact package that it finds itself in, or does it ever feel kind of like weird, strange bedfellows of selling it in this way? How does that work feel emotionally to you?
Eli Cain: Yeah, good question. And maybe I would say our work really has two main tracks. On one hand, we’re focused on these near-term, very pragmatic policies that we can integrate within the broader messaging of industrial policy in the US, and we’re focused on that work because the domestic carbon removal industry can’t wait around. We are in a critical moment where companies are really struggling and they need near-term support. And so we are really focused on providing them that support through federal policy. At the same time, we are also thinking about the big ambitious policies. What are the big swings that we can take to be really market-shaping forces? And those are policies that take a long time to both develop and to create the political coalitions to make sure they’re viable. And so in the background, we’re doing all of this political will building and coalition building to say, hey, eventually, when we have the opportunity to take a big swing, what does that look like? And what does the carbon industry really need? And I would say between those two things, I stay very energized to know that we can support near-term companies and make sure that companies aren’t going out of business and we’re not losing the progress that we’ve made over the last decade. And then thinking big about what comes next. And the combination of those two things really energizes me.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s really good to hear. I think that’s true of a lot of bills though, that there are some things that people wrote five years ahead of time, and then the political moment arrives and it’s like, oh, this draft has been floating around the Hill for a long time. That’s probably how it works, right?
Eli Cain: Yeah, exactly right. If you look at the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, these are generational pieces of climate policy. They took 20 years to pass. Really, by the time you look at where some of the core concepts and core ideas in both of those bills originated, it was back in the Obama administration. These things take a long time to gain momentum. And so we want to make sure that we’re thoughtful about that and we’re building the political coalition so eventually we do reach that end goal, but that we’re not putting all of our eggs in that basket and that we’re also focused on the near-term pragmatic things that can really have tangible impacts today.
Ross Kenyon: I could see some stories being really powerful. I worked in ag for a long time and being a farmer right now seems not so fun. Really had a terrible go of things recently with commodity prices, and synthetic fertilizers are only getting more expensive, and energy is going up. And then we saw China switching its soybean buying, which I think they changed back a little bit, so it wasn’t a permanent switch, but I think there’s probably going to be a fair amount of USDA kind of momentum there for various types of carbon removal. That seems like a pretty natural thing. Is that a true insight? Is that actually happening to the degree that one might expect?
Eli Cain: Yeah, I think supporting American farmers is a positive political narrative at any stage, and it’s currently true today. So we work in coalition with folks like Cascade Climate and some enhanced rock weathering companies to think through what does the domestic enhanced rock weathering field need today? And we put together a few different policy proposals. Some are tied to the appropriations process, some are tied to the farm bill. But they’re all focused around the same idea of how do we support the enhanced rock weathering field and thereby support the American agricultural industry from international competition and rising prices and all these things. So it’s absolutely something that we think about.
Ross Kenyon: What’s the status of the farm bill?
Eli Cain: Farm bill is a little up in the air and we get mixed messages on that every day. Right now it’s looking like it’s unlikely to advance past the markup, but new intel on that every time. So don’t hold me to it. I would say in the near term, we think the FY27 appropriations process probably provides a more tangible route to success than the farm bill does. So that’s kind of how we’re thinking about it now.
Ross Kenyon: I didn’t understand the mining story as clearly. Where was the savings element of it? Because I’m also seeing rollback for various requirements to manage toxicity and pollutants of other kinds. And so if it relates to that work, this has come up on the show a bunch in the last year, but the tension between MAGA and MAHA, and I was wondering, maybe MAHA would have some of this anti-toxicity stuff that would drive some of this policy that wasn’t carbon related but was focused on PFAS and forever chemicals and stuff like this. And I don’t feel like it’s happened. I feel like the RFK thing has been a little bit of a sideshow and any of those hopes haven’t really materialized. But maybe I’m missing something. What’s driving the interest of mining companies in carbon removal?
Eli Cain: Yeah, a few things. Maybe I’ll start at the high level and then talk through the problem we’re trying to solve with our specific policy. So at the high level, most of the mining majors have their own net-zero targets, so that is something that is true kind of across the board. If you look at the 20 largest mining companies in the world, almost all of them have their own internal net-zero targets. So they’re trying to do this work, which is super admirable. The other thing is that the integration of carbon removal onto both active and legacy mine sites brings really tangible non-carbon-removal benefits, and those are the things that are really attractive to the mining sector. So those are things like reducing the volume of the waste materials that they produce. These are huge environmental liabilities. If you look at the phosphogypsum industry, the phosphogypsum stacks that they produce are literally radioactive stacks of waste material that they have to treat all the water that goes through them and control them for the lifetime of that stack. It is literally the largest environmental liability these companies have. And so if we can reduce the volume of waste that goes into that, we’re saving them money. That’s not an intangible. That’s a practical cost saver. And that is true for other implementations as well. When we think about things like asbestos remediation, the process of carbon mineralization for asbestos destroys the toxic asbestos fibers that you find on these sites. And that’s again a huge public health and environmental safety benefit. But I think the key point here is they’re interested because you’re bringing tangible, non-carbon-removal benefits to their business.
Ross Kenyon: For the phosphogypsum point, the radioactive waste, I imagine it’s waste rock. What exactly is happening here? How is it becoming not that?
Eli Cain: Yeah, so it is literally stored in these giant tailing dams, these giant piles. And what happens is when rain goes through it, it releases acid water runoff. And so you can have companies like Travertine Tech, which is one that does this. They use that waste for carbon mineralization instead. So instead of going into a tailing dam, they are using that for carbon removal, reducing the volume that goes into the pile.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, so it’s just an input for a carbon removal process that is somehow obliterating the radioactivity or transforming it in some way.
Eli Cain: Yeah. Travertine’s process is incredible. They just opened up their pilot facility up in New York. And speaking of domestic fertilizer inputs, those are a huge input into that. And so their process is a really wonderful example of how you can have this varied approach to carbon removal where you’re having an industrial benefit tie into an existing industry like agriculture and fertilizer and saving the domestic mining companies money.
Ross Kenyon: How’s it looking for BECCS and direct air capture with 45Q? I think everyone noticed how protected that was, and I think it caught some people off guard.
Eli Cain: Yeah, I think this is something we don’t talk about enough in the carbon removal industry. The dominant political narrative over the last year has been energy dominance and energy security. We have an energy play in carbon removal. It’s called bioenergy with carbon capture. We are literally generating energy and at the same time doing carbon removal. And so I think we’ve seen this both in terms of the scale of industry as BECCS has grown recently with its ability to scale quickly and its political saliency. It’s a really powerful message that we don’t emphasize enough. So I’m very bullish on BECCS. I think it makes a ton of sense to do. And we’ve seen really strong support for it. As you noted, 45Q was one of the only energy tax credits to not only be preserved but expanded as part of the reconciliation package, the One Big Beautiful Bill last year. So that was expanded, which I think was a really positive sign for the carbon removal industry and was a good blueprint for how we engage a diverse political coalition to protect these key policies. It was protected both because of its carbon removal potential, but also because of its association with other industries like oil and gas.
Ross Kenyon: How much inertia is there in the legislature? I think one thing you could say independently of your politics here, divorced from any sort of pejorative framing or judgment, Trump is a sort of intuitive, mercurial person. He seems like he’s driven often by his gut. He kind of just says how he feels a lot of times for better or for worse. And it seems hard to make policy around, where one of the main benefits of holding the presidency is the bully pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt. You get to influence people. You get the biggest microphone in the entire world. And you can kind of call the tune a little bit. And that is not the same for either party in Congress. Party members in there mostly are operating by different rules, and there’s an inertia that carries them along outside of just what is top of the news. What are the headlines in the newspaper that day? That does influence them, but there’s also just a deeper current. Those are like little eddies on top for the most part, but they’re in the mainstream of the current. What is the relationship between that mercurial nature of the presidency and the bully pulpit, and then the inertia that carries Congress along? Wow. If I had a definitive answer to that question, I’d be a very smart man.
It’s a podcast, so you just say some nonsense and I’ll publish it.
Eli Cain: I’ll say it’s complicated and it varies, which is not a satisfactory answer, but I’ll provide a little bit more detail. On one hand, getting inroads into this administration has been tricky for the full environmental movement, not just carbon removal. And something that we as the Carbon Removal Alliance have really prioritized over the last year, and I know others have as well, is understanding how the administration makes its decisions and when they will make those decisions. A key example would be around the existing programs left over from the Biden administration, things like the DAC Hubs program, the CDR purchase pilot prize. A lot of these were literal contracts that were awarded prior to the inauguration, and there’s been a lot of ambiguity around the status of these. And finding definitive answers to that has been really tricky. And so we’ve spent a lot of time working with the administration officials that we know and with Congress to say, can we get a little bit more insight into how these things work? But it’s a little tricky and sometimes it is a black box, and that’s something that we’re continuing to figure out how to navigate. I’ll say the relationship between the administration and Congress seems to ebb and flow over time. And I can’t speak specifically on it, but it’s certainly the case that the president’s wishes aren’t always translated into congressional action. Maybe three hours before we’re recording this, the president’s budget request was released. This is what the president wants to see in next year’s budget. And so that’s a good predictor of administration action. It’s largely a symbolic document because Congress still holds power of the purse, but it’s a good general indicator of what the admin wants. And you do not always, in fact you very frequently, see that request not translated into the final appropriations that Congress passes. So there isn’t a direct line even though the politics there are very complicated.
Ross Kenyon: When I had Aaron Burns on, and she was on the Carbon Removal Policy Scoop with Eva and Sebastian, she had some line that caught my attention where she was very stubbornly refusing to change her rhetoric into something other than the reasons that she cares about carbon removal. I’m not sure if she still holds that as strongly, but we ended up talking about that a lot where she viewed this moment as transitory. And one of the main questions I have about politics right now is how much of this is going to be seen as a detour before we got back into the mainstream again. Like, okay, that was a thing, the US changing its orientation from what it’s been since World War II, maybe that wasn’t perfect but it’s better than what we tried to trade it for, and we go back. Or is this a new world order and the midterms don’t go that well and maybe aren’t super fair and the world has changed in some dramatic way. And Aaron’s bet was very much on the world will arc back around, and when it does, we don’t want to have to redo all of our comms that we’ve been building and potentially betray, or at the very least downplay, our values for caring about carbon removal in that time. We will have ceded rhetorical ground that we will then have to recover. I think that’s a really smart, really interesting perspective. But then the way that you’re discussing this seems more fluid. Mercenary is the word that comes to mind. It’s not right because it is not that you don’t care about it, but there’s more of a fluidity to the way that you’re trying to achieve your goals. Because it seems like maybe in the long term you have both these near-term and longer-term things, and maybe in the long term I doubt you and Aaron are super different in how you view carbon removal and its place in the world. But maybe on these shorter timescales, these meetings, maybe you are willing to be flexible in a way that her rhetoric has pinned her in a tiny bit. You can challenge that. I may be mischaracterizing this. Aaron, if you’re listening, I’m very sorry. If you feel like I’ve mischaracterized you, come correct me. It’s fine. What do you think, Eli?
Eli Cain: The first thing I’d say is we work very closely with the Carbon 180 team and appreciate the work they do immensely. I would go back to something I said previously, which is durable policy will always be bipartisan policy, and that is true today, but that will be true tomorrow and that’ll be true in the next administration. And so we will always prioritize being bipartisan in the work that we do.
Ross Kenyon: Clean energy jobs in red districts is like the smartest thing ever. That is why I think a lot of it survived, right?
Eli Cain: Yeah. I could not agree more. And so it really isn’t about changing how we talk about it in a fundamental way. It’s just about talking about how we integrate with the broader suite of policies that these offices already care about. And that’s how you introduce a new topic to someone. If you walk into someone and say, guys, let me tell you about the IPCC, you’re going to lose them at the beginning. But if you say, hey, you work with farmers, you know what their needs are, here’s how we support them, that is a much easier way to introduce someone to a new concept and to bring them along for the ride. So part of it is just general education around what carbon removal is and is not. So I don’t think that the way that we talk about it and the way they talk about it are fundamentally different. I just think that we’re focused on slightly different things at different times.
Ross Kenyon: What don’t I know about? There’s a lot of things that could fall into that category, but what don’t I know about that’s happening in the policy world that is genuinely exciting, that people are going to be over the moon about when they hear it?
Eli Cain: Ooh, it’s a good question. So maybe I’ll just quickly highlight two of the policies that we talked about with our members on the fly-in day and that we’ve found really good success with. I’m sure you’re deeply embedded in the carbon removal industry. I know that the framing around industrial integrations has been the hot topic in carbon removal for the last year.
Ross Kenyon: Counteract just had that piece they put out about it. A lot of people are talking about it.
Eli Cain: A lot of people are talking about it, and we are too. I think from my standpoint, the important next step is translating that discussion into actual policy. It’s one thing to say, hey, yeah, we should do industrial integrations. It’s another thing to actually make that tangible and to bring that into the policy sphere. And so that’s a lot of the work that we do. Maybe two quick examples of it. One, I mentioned the development of enhanced rock weathering policy with Cascade and that broader coalition. This is the idea that we need to create an enhanced rock weathering research network in the US to better study the agronomic benefits of carbon removal on various soil types and geographies to say, hey, we have empirical data that we actually do have these co-benefits that we claim. And that will really help wider adoption by the agricultural industry because we’ll have greater proof that we actually work. Farmers literally bet the farm on the soil amendments they use. And so having empirical data that enhanced rock weathering does deliver on these agronomic benefits is really important. So that’s something that we’re advancing. The other one would be around the domestic mining space. There’s an existing EPA program called the Environmental Monitoring, Remediation, and Technical Assessment Initiative, very long. We shorthand it as EMRTAI. It’s a $3 million EPA program designed to catalyze innovative new mining technologies on waste material. And so this program has been running for the last few years. It’s a cooperative agreement with PATEL, and what we’re doing is trying to expand that to include carbon removal. Because what this program does is it provides access to feedstocks and locations to validate and do small-scale pilot deployments on new technologies. And when we talked with our members and the mining sector around what the gap was for mineralization, it was exactly that. The mining sector is risk averse and they want to be fast followers, not first movers. And so they needed proof that it works. But who’s taking the first step here? Who’s taking that risk? And to me that’s the role of policy, to say can we provide these companies access to a feedstock and a location for a pilot deployment, thereby generating the data they need to accelerate into existing industry.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, those are really exciting. Good to know. Last question. Have I become a little bit of a chicken little? Do you think I’m overdoing it a little bit? Do you think you need to rein me back in? I very much hope that I’m incorrect and would welcome the soothing rhetorical embrace of Eli Cain, second tallest man in carbon removal. Please help.
Eli Cain: Listen, I totally understand where you’re coming from. And as someone who cares about environmental policy at large, not just carbon removal, some of the trends have been really challenging to absorb. I think carbon removal has a path towards political progress now that I’m really excited about. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be cognizant of the broader political landscape. So my answer to you would be, I understand it, and I still think we have an opportunity here in the next few years to make tangible progress and preserve the progress that we’ve had over the last decade. And we just have to be thoughtful and creative in how we do it.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being on, Eli. Really appreciate it.
Eli Cain: No, thank you for the opportunity. It was a blast.
As a CDR advocate I celebrate every grant, subsidy or public procurement. One thing I struggled to defend in my work is how to make sure a fair distribution of public capital. Meaning that giants (like BEECS and DACCS) don't become too big to fail, at the expense of smaller, distributed CDR solutions. I'd be curious to hear how policy makers look at that.
is essential for worldwide infrastructure!!!
50Gt/a are not uptakes by the biosphere and need to be technically removed including the historic depth.