The Uncomfortable Truth About Carbon Removal Quality
Why the pursuit of perfection might be sabotaging our climate goals, and why the optimal number of traffic deaths may be nonzero
This is an essayistic summation of episode 344 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you enjoy your shows. I actually do not currently think this is nearly as big of a problem as when I recorded this show, but it is still worth keeping in mind how much one pays for each marginal unit of improvement. Marginal analysis is important!
I have a friend who's an economist—the kind who delights in pushing buttons and offering hardcore trade-off thought experiments that keep you up at night. One day, he told me something that has lived rent-free in my brain ever since:
"The optimal number of traffic deaths is non-zero."
Before you recoil in horror, let me explain what this means and why it matters for the future of carbon removal.
The Trade-off We've Already Made
That provocative statement means we've collectively accepted a trade-off: moving around efficiently in cars is more valuable than driving at perfectly safe speeds. We could drive five miles per hour everywhere. The mortality rate would plummet, but it would take forever to get anywhere.
Instead, we've chosen efficiency over perfect safety. Tens of thousands of people die in traffic accidents each year in the United States alone—deaths that could be prevented if we simply drove slower or not at all. But we've decided the benefits of efficient transportation outweigh the costs.
The Carbon Removal Quality Obsession
This economist's provocation comes to mind constantly when I think about carbon removal and our industry's obsession with quality. There's a common refrain in our space: "The problem is trust, and we move at the speed of trust."
That's true to an extent. But sometimes we get so focused on perfecting the quality of carbon removal that we start trading off against other critical attributes—like scale.
The Perfect Credit Paradox
Imagine we could create perfect carbon removal credits that are:
100% durable (guaranteed to stay sequestered)
100% additional (wouldn't happen without payment)
100% just (no negative impacts on anyone)
How many credits could possibly meet this standard? Very few. And they would be extremely expensive. The massive effort required to guarantee perfection would make them prohibitively costly.
Quality vs. Scale: The Real Trade-off
Here's the uncomfortable truth: quality is not something we need to maximize at the expense of everything else. It faces trade-offs, and at some point, pursuing perfect quality becomes more harmful than good.
The goal of carbon removal—and all carbon management—is to decrease atmospheric CO2 as quickly as possible while avoiding catastrophic disruption to civilization. If we create perfect carbon removal credits but only generate a handful because they're impossibly expensive, we've failed at the bigger picture.
Key Insight: The goal is to have an impact on climate that results in less human suffering and less disruption to ecosystems. Perfect credits that don't scale won't achieve this goal.
The Pareto Principle in Carbon Removal
The Pareto Principle suggests that 20% of effort often yields 80% of results. In carbon removal, this means we can get pretty close to high quality with our first attempts, but each additional unit of "perfection" costs much more.
Getting to that 80% quality threshold might cost 20% of our effort. But pushing from 80% to 90% quality could cost another 30% of effort. And reaching 95% quality might require doubling our total investment.
The Rat Poop Problem
A different friend of mine has an even more visceral example: "The optimal amount of rat poop in cereal is non-zero." It's disgusting, but it illustrates the point perfectly.
Rodents are always present in grain production and storage. We could optimize for zero rat contamination, but the cost would be enormous—potentially making cereal unaffordable for many people. Instead, we accept trace amounts while maintaining safety standards.
This isn't about accepting poor quality or abandoning standards. It's about recognizing that optimizing too far on one dimension can harm our ability to achieve the overall goal.
Learning from Market Crises
Critics often point to scandals in the voluntary carbon market—Guardian exposés, John Oliver segments, investigations into specific projects. These were certainly problematic, but they tell us what we already knew: at volume, some projects will fail or underperform.
The people most supportive of these criticisms—were they ever going to embrace market-based climate solutions anyway? Meanwhile, those who understand the nuance recognize that not all carbon projects are created equal. Some are high-quality, some are medium-quality, and some are riskier bets that should be priced accordingly.
We don't expect all bonds to reach maturity without default. We price in risk and diversify. The same logic should apply to carbon credits.
The Two Wolves Within Us
I think everyone in this space has two competing impulses:
Wolf #1: Wants to ensure we do enough carbon removal, even if it's imperfect, to actually reverse climate change.
Wolf #2: Wants to never cut corners and ensure everything is done with perfect integrity.
Both wolves have good intentions. We're here because we care about climate and don't want to be part of an industry that lets the world down. But perfectionism can be paralyzing when speed is essential.
Moving at the Speed of Crisis
Moving slowly is the same as dying in terms of our industry's potential impact. We need to balance quality with urgency, recognizing that the perfect is the enemy of the good—and the good is the enemy of the adequate at scale.
The Bottom Line: All I care about is getting atmospheric CO2 down to pre-industrial levels as quickly and ethically as possible. If obsessing over quality above all else is the way to do that, I'll gladly change my mind. But I don't believe that's the truth of the matter.
A Call for Empirical Thinking
I'm not committed to this position at all costs. I'm open to empirical arguments that could sway this opinion. But I've seen too many instances where emphasis on quality or trust doesn't account for other variables, making it sound like the costs are negligible.
That's not the truth of the matter. Everything has trade-offs. The question is whether we're making the right ones.
So I'll leave you with that uncomfortable economist's provocation: The optimal number of traffic deaths is non-zero. The optimal amount of imperfection in carbon removal might be non-zero too.
Think about how much we might be overemphasizing quality. Make sure we're not doing it in a way that loses sight of other critical variables. We cannot optimize for just one variable in this complex system.
The stakes are too high, and time is too short, for anything less than clear-eyed pragmatism.
What do you think?
This is a complex issue with reasonable people holding different views. I'd love to hear your thoughts on where the right balance lies between quality and scale in carbon removal.
Are we being too perfectionist? Not careful enough? Share your perspective in the comments.