If a room is increasingly filling with smoke, it’s important to slow how quickly that’s happening. But remember: things are still getting worse, just more slowly. At some point, you’ve got to start to clear the air.

The same is true for greenhouse gases. Yes, we absolutely must prioritize the reduction of our collective emissions, but if humanity is to protect itself from increasingly devastating and destructive climate events, we must also prioritize the removal of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere.

The reason is that, as CO₂ continues to accumulate, it remains in the atmosphere for centuries. Moreover, a study from Norway suggests that accumulated atmospheric CO₂ can take up to 50 years before it fully impacts our climate. That means that the extreme climate events that we are currently experiencing might only reflect CO₂ emissions from the 1970s. Even if we were to hit net zero today, we still face decades of increasingly devastating climate events — that is until we bring CO₂ levels in our atmosphere back to pre-industrial levels.

The good news is that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) processes are scientifically possible and have been proven effective by global innovators. If we accelerate the rate at which these innovations are scaled into our biological and industrial systems, we might just be able to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

This will require strong political leadership, directing our regulators to safely enable the deployment of emerging technologies and creating credible carbon market frameworks that will attract the much-needed investment. Everything points to the fact that Canada has the elements needed to become a global leader in developing and scaling innovative CDR methods into economically viable global solutions.

How do we begin to make progress?

To be successful, a highly entrepreneurial, COVID-type approach will be needed, involving political leaders, government officials, regulators and academia working together to enable the success of private-sector innovators. Academia and the private sector are already on board. CDR innovators with proven technologies, globally, are working with researchers and are searching for a political, regulatory and investment home that is committed to scaling existing and future CDR technologies. Equally importantly, many of the biggest companies in the world are looking to invest in regulated carbon markets that will provide them with increasing levels of certainty.

So how does Canada deliver market certainty? Regulators need to be investment-centric, listening carefully to the buyers of carbon credits — and not let perfection be the enemy of progress. Well-regulated markets manage uncertainty by providing transparency, and transparency will allow markets to decide the different value associated with credits from different CDR methods. Currently, the two biggest variables that will determine value relate to the measurement of:

• Permanence: how long carbon removed from the atmosphere will stay out of the atmosphere; and
• Additionality: would the emissions reductions or removals have occurred without revenue from the sale of carbon credits?

What are examples of different CDR methods?

A wide variety of CDR methods exist and each offers different levels of permanence and additionality. But the scale of the climate crisis is such that we need to back all of the horses in this race, resulting in credits being priced differently for different CDR methods. Currently, the most valuable carbon credits are associated with direct air capture (DAC) technologies that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it permanently underground. DAC facilities already exist in Iceland and others are currently being built in Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia.

DAC carbon credits are the most valuable because they provide buyers with the greatest certainty as it relates to both additionality and permanence. Consequently, some buyers are motivated to pay up to 10 times more for DAC carbon credits as compared to the federal government’s current $80 per tonne benchmark price on carbon. Our political leaders and regulators should be listening very closely to these global investors because Canada has the opportunity to become a leading destination for their investment capital.

DAC differs from Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) because CCS only reduces the CO₂ emissions from ongoing industrial activity. To go back to our original analogy, CCS reduces the rate at which smoke is filling the room but does not clear the air. It is an important “point-source” carbon capture method (e.g., at the smokestack) but has a different purpose and a much less substantial impact on climate change mitigation than DAC.

Nature-based CDR methods apply technologies to optimize and accelerate the natural processes of photosynthesis and ocean alkalinity to sequester carbon. Carbon sequestration in agricultural soils and forestry are designed to increase the amount of photosynthesis in a given area, and at scale these can remove vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. In terms of our oceans, decades of research has shown that they have been acidified by rapid increases in atmospheric CO₂. Equally, evidence has demonstrated that this acidification can be reversed locally by scaling approaches that purposefully increase alkalinity, causing the health of our oceans to improve while permanently removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it as salt dissolved in seawater.

Current technologies can help to harness and accelerate these natural processes. Unfortunately, they have been ignored, with an example being that Canada’s forests are no longer carbon sinks, they are carbon sources. This situation can be reversed, but only evidence and experience will enable markets to steadily increase confidence in the associated levels of permanence and additionality associated with each CDR method.

So where to from here?

First, if we are to craft programs that will catalyze the investment needed to scale a wide breadth of existing and emerging technologies, policy makers and politicians need to internalize the differences between CDR methods, in particular between DAC and “point-source” carbon capture.

Second, political consensus, social license, regulatory agility and investment-friendly market frameworks are essential if these approaches are to play a crucial role in saving our planet for future generations.

It’s abundantly clear that we will never stabilize our climate by only reducing our CO₂ emissions. Global leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney sounded the alarm on climate change more than 30 years ago. We did not listen. Since then, annual global CO₂ emissions have increased by more than 50%. Their warnings of the resulting ecological, environmental, social and economic effects are no longer a prediction, but our reality.

Today’s political leaders and regulators must now look to investors, innovators and entrepreneurs if we are to be successful. No big challenge has ever been solved without innovators and entrepreneurs, and no challenge is bigger than the current climate crisis.

Senator Colin Deacon is an advocate for innovation who serves as the chair of the Senate’s Advisory Working Group on Environment and Sustainability. He represents Nova Scotia.

This article was published in The Hill Times on August 15, 2024.