100 Conversations on Carbon Removal, with Holly Buck

Producer’s Note: The following episode of the podcast was recorded prior to the 2024 presidential election.

Notable Quotes

• Public engagement could foster support for clean energy technologies: “We really need to be appropriating funding for engagement about [decarbonization] … But the public just isn’t aware of the range of transformation required, and that’s going to be a big challenge for trying to scale up clean energy, much less carbon removal … We have to fund the engagement to a level that’s commensurate with the challenge.” (18:22)
• People actually can understand clean energy technologies and related incentives: “Sometimes we have this idea that these things are technical or complex. They’re really not too technical or complex for people, but people are skeptical about this, because they don’t see enough progress on the basic energy transition. And so, they have questions about the life-cycle analysis of carbon removal if we haven’t even decarbonized yet—really common-sense questions that I think we need to do more as academics to communicate better about.” (23:27)
• The energy transition has to be voluntary: “I don’t think people are against the energy transition, but some of them are against the idea that other people are going to tell them how to live. It really has to be a voluntary adoption.” (25:26)

Top of the Stack

• “100 Conversations on Carbon Removal, Decarbonization, and Desired Futures” by Holly Jean Buck and Travis Young
• Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. Holly Buck, associate professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo and a climate justice fellow at Harvard's Salata Institute.

Along with several colleagues, Holly recently published a fascinating working paper called “100 Conversations on Carbon Removal, Decarbonization, and Desired Futures.” The paper looks to understand how people in communities across the United States are experiencing the energy transition, the effects of recent federal laws, and a range of carbon-removal technologies. We'll talk about what the report finds, including whether community members understand the pace and scale of the transformation needed to reach net-zero emissions, the barriers that stand in the way of making those changes, and what policymakers can do to make progress. Stay with us.

Holly Buck, welcome to Resources Radio. It's great to have you here.

Holly Buck: It's great to be here.

Daniel Raimi: Holly, I'm really excited for this conversation. I’ve followed your work for a long time, and this is the first time I've gotten to talk to you about it. But before we dive into the substance of our conversation, we always ask our guests how they got interested in working on environmental issues, whether there was some early-in-life inspiration or whether you fell into this line of work later in life. How did that work out for you?

Holly Buck: Well, I was always interested in working on environmental issues but not very good at science class, so I had a winding path. For me, it really crystallized when I went to the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009 and saw how behind we were and what a mess it was, and I thought, "Okay, I really should focus on climate change full time."

Daniel Raimi: That's interesting. How did you end up going to the Copenhagen climate conference if you weren't already working on climate stuff?

Holly Buck: I was a master's student at that time at Lund University, which is right across the bridge, and I had the opportunity to go and listen in as a student delegate.

Daniel Raimi: Great. That makes sense. Super interesting.

Well, as I mentioned in the introduction, we're going to talk today about a recent working paper that you published that summarizes 100 conversations that you had with a really wide range of people about carbon removal. To get us started, can you tell us what you mean by that term in this context? How were you talking about carbon removal in these conversations?

Holly Buck: I was talking about different approaches to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it somewhere else. Typically, I would show two diagrams. I'd have printouts talking with the person. The first one would be about getting to net-zero emissions and the way in which these net-zero curves involve rapid emissions reductions right away and then typically some amount of ongoing emissions that's counterbalanced with carbon dioxide removals. The second image I would show would be a diagram from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shows the range of carbon-removal approaches, from soils and biochar and land-based methods, to more industrial approaches with geologic storage and rock formations underground and even marine carbon dioxide–removal methods on the other side of the chart.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. Listeners to this show will be familiar with most of the carbon-removal approaches that you just talked about, but we've never actually talked about marine carbon removal. Can you help us understand what that idea is all about?

Holly Buck: Yeah. The oceans take up a lot of carbon, so there's questions about whether that can be enhanced and what the impacts would be. But some of the main approaches that have been researched to date involve ocean iron fertilization or ocean alkalinity enhancement.

Daniel Raimi: Great, and people can look up those terms if they want to learn more about it.

So, when you had these conversations with people, where did you go, who did you talk to, and what types of folks were you looking to speak with?

Holly Buck: This was a mixed-methods study funded by the Sloan Foundation. We were looking at five different regions of the United States, and we were interested in places that might have some potential for some sort of carbon-removal approach, and we were also trying to understand a wide range of ecosystems and cultural geographies, as well. We went to coastal Maine, northern West Virginia, north central Oklahoma, Alaska's Railbelt region, as well as the Northern Sierra in California. So, five very different places.

The people we were talking with involved both lay publics who might not have known much about this and what we would consider local experts. We did focus groups with the public, two in each region, and those were people that were recruited for a balance of age, political affiliation, race, and gender. For the local experts, we wanted people in different kinds of groupings and sectors, such as agriculture; forestry; fishing; NGOs, including environmental and environmental justice NGOs; the business sector, from startups, to investors, to people that represent different industries; and local academics or extension agents. That's who we were talking to in the interviews, and we did over 100 conversations altogether.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. We're going to talk largely about carbon removal, but one of the cross-cutting themes of the report is a little bit broader. It's about the energy transition writ large and also how recent federal legislation like the bipartisan Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are being felt on the ground and what types of challenges community members are experiencing when they are looking to take advantage of those laws. Can you talk a little bit about what you heard in those conversations about how it's going with the implementation of these laws, and the challenges that people are facing?

Holly Buck: I forgot to mention that we also tried to talk to people working in government, at the local, state, federal, and Tribal level. There's a lot going on, obviously, with this legislation. What we were hearing were concerns about the social infrastructure needed to deploy that money well. By social infrastructure, I mean both person-hours, human resources, and having funded permanent positions, as well as the connections and the relationships, which do seem to be working in most of these places.

There are all these informal networks, but there are different pieces of this. First, people need to hear about these opportunities. That's working through these networks, but a little bit unevenly. Then they have to understand how to apply for the grants. That can be a big challenge, especially in places where there's more remote communities and small towns—they might not have the people available to do that. And then, on the federal side, there's a challenge with reviewing and vetting applications. There's just so much work to do there. And then the big piece is really spending the money once it's received.

Throughout this, there's also challenges about engaging with the public when it comes to public-facing aspects of these programs, like incentives for heat pumps or something like that. So, we have more work to do to build up the social infrastructure to deploy all of this money well.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting.

One term that I've used in some research that I've done and that I've heard from others is this idea of capacity to take advantage of grants. Is this idea of having capacity similar to what you mean by social infrastructure, or is it different?

Holly Buck: I think it's very similar, but the nuances with the infrastructure metaphor involve something that you need to maintain over time continuously and also the connections or the links between people. You can think of those as aspects of capacity.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm curious—is there an example that comes to mind of a project that illustrates the importance of social capacity or illustrates the challenges that local organizations or individuals were having in taking advantage of these laws or spending the money once they got it?

Holly Buck: Oh my goodness, there's so many stories. I would have a hard time picking just one. The things I've been the most familiar with involve aspects around the carbon-management programs where the public engagement is a really critical piece. But people talked about the need to engage with new technologies throughout the energy transition.

Daniel Raimi: That's interesting. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by engaging with new technologies?

Holly Buck: People want to see that this new thing has worked in a community like theirs. They want some proof of concept before they throw their support behind something. That might be an obvious thing when it comes to something like carbon management, where you have more unfamiliar, risky components to those projects. But it even applies to something like heat pumps or electric buses. They might have had experiences with purchasing electric buses in their town, but then the maintenance people got frustrated with them and it ended up not working out, and then they feel more skeptical about other things that might be coming. So, having these demonstrations and the storytelling aspect of that is really important.

Daniel Raimi: That's super interesting and it makes sense. That bus example is really illustrative.

Let's talk more about carbon removal now. When you had these conversations with folks who were trying to deploy carbon removal, either locally or regionally, what were some of the major issues that they described to you? Either financial or technical or other barriers they were facing?

Holly Buck: It's hard to generalize about all of the carbon removal approaches together, because they're all in very different stages. If you think about, for example, the idea of using forestry waste or residue from overstocked forests in northern California where it's a wildfire hazard to have so much fuel, and then using that for biomass carbon removal and storage—you can understand the conceptual pieces, but there's a whole supply chain that would need to be built out for that to happen. It's the personnel and the financial incentives to go gather all of that wood. It's a very hard job. There might not be enough heavy machinery available in the system to do it at scale. Then, it needs to be transported through these very narrow, windy mountain roads; that could be another challenge. Then, you need facilities to combust it. Those may be contentious, because people have had bad experiences with biomass, because now you're out of the mountains and into the Central Valley, where there's already a lot of places that aren't in attainment with air-quality standards. Then, you have the geologic storage piece and the permitting, the monitoring, the social acceptance with that …

So, if you think throughout this chain, there's both social and technical things that would all have to line up, and we're just not there yet. This challenge applies to other things, too, like hydrogen and anything where you need all of the supply and demand to match. And we could talk about the other carbon-removal approaches. They have different barriers. But overall, there's a question hanging around what the business model and the demand side looks like.

Daniel Raimi: Let's do that. Can you give us another example of a particular technology and what types of issues it might be facing?

Holly Buck: Yeah. We talked a lot about soil-carbon sequestration in Oklahoma. There's a lot of people working on regenerative agriculture there and thinking about how to increase adoption of that. There's good grant funding going into that, both research from the private sector and philanthropy, as well as government funding for this.

So, what are the barriers? We heard about barriers with regards to having the capital to have new implements, barriers in terms of the price of soil, and whether carbon credits are worth the investment. There are a lot of questions on the adopter’s side about whether this would really be a good fit for their farm. But, at least with that example, I feel pretty optimistic about where things are headed. There's a lot of social infrastructure actually devoted to it compared to some of these other approaches.

Daniel Raimi: That's interesting. This is totally outside of my research area, but I didn't realize that soil-carbon credits existed. Are these on private carbon markets, or is it part of California's cap-and-trade program?

Holly Buck: A lot of companies, like agribusiness companies and companies like Indigo, for example, have programs that growers can sign up with. So, this would mostly be on the voluntary market with corporate fires of some kind.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. You mentioned a couple of minutes ago the concerns that folks in the Central Valley of California had with biomass combustion. Can you talk a little bit about the other social challenges or public-perception issues that you heard about with regard to either biomass, if you want to say more about biomass, or any of the other relevant technologies? I'm thinking particularly about geologic carbon storage, but I wonder if this came up in other areas, too.

Holly Buck: It wouldn't be things that aren't already in the literature. Frankly, we have a pretty good literature now on public perceptions and concerns with the risks of geologic storage as well as carbon dioxide transport. People are worried about leaks, risks to groundwater-induced seismicity from injection, especially in jurisdictions where they feel like the state government has been doing a poor job regulating these things. They're concerned about transportation because of pipeline leaks, especially with the example of what happened in Satartia, Mississippi, where a few dozen people were sent to the hospital from a carbon dioxide pipeline leak. So, those sets of concerns, we heard them here. They're not new. They're well documented.

Daniel Raimi: That makes sense. I'm curious about something like soil-carbon sequestration. Were there any concerns that people voiced there about the food that was produced using those techniques, or is that not really an issue?

Holly Buck: No. The issue is more for growers, who have concerns about whether they can't flexibly manage their land, how they want to be locked into a structure, and increased labor demands for some of the activities.

Daniel Raimi: That's interesting.

Next, I have an absurdly broad question that I'm hoping you can take and narrow as you see fit, which is about policy implications. When you think about lessons for policymakers when they're trying to implement the existing laws or come up with new laws to drive decarbonization or carbon removal specifically, what are some of the top ones that come to mind for you?

Holly Buck: We really need to be appropriating funding for engagement about this, because the overall picture of what it's going to take to get to net zero—the people we were interviewing knew about it, the local experts. But the public just isn’t aware of the range of transformation required, and that's going to be a big challenge for trying to scale up clean energy, much less carbon removal. That would be number one. We have to fund the engagement to a level that's commensurate with the challenge.

I still think there's other lessons here for how we can see more of this innovation in different approaches more regionally. There's a lot of local, state-level enthusiasm about entrepreneurship, about supporting startups, but a lot of it is geared towards software more than hard tech. So, there's more we could do to support innovation happening across the country.

The third thing I'd say is that demonstration projects are really important for these first-of-a-kind projects—having them be social demonstrations, not just demonstrations of the technology. It would be great if we could fund more for these early projects so they can be shared, so their stories can be told and local people can really go to these places, experience what's going on. That's going to be really important for scaling down the line.

Daniel Raimi: I'm curious, just continuing in that vein—is there a pilot project that comes to mind for you where there is a particularly interesting or important story that you would want to share with us, so we could better understand how it's working and how it's affecting communities?

Holly Buck: When it comes to carbon removal, a lot of these early projects, the ones I visited, have some challenges. I think the thing that is exciting is when it comes to agricultural approaches—and this would apply to enhanced rock weathering, too, maybe—is the idea of a field day that's already in the culture of rural communities. I went to one innovation campus recently in North Dakota, the Grand Farm Innovation Campus, where they had a field day where they had different growers trying out new things. This relates to agricultural decarbonization broadly, not just carbon removal. There's lessons from that culture of knowledge-sharing through being at a site and having this embodied experience. It would be nice if we could expand that way of thinking to some of the industrial approaches, as well.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. I'm going to display my ignorance as a city boy and ask, what's a field day?

Holly Buck: I don't know the technical definition, but in my experience, it's when you have different presentations from different growers and you're out in the field looking at stuff. It might be a piece of equipment; it might be a test plot. It involves actually being in a field to some degree, in my experience.

Daniel Raimi: Field days, when I was a kid, were when you got a half day off of school and you got to play in the playground for the whole afternoon, but that's because I did not grow up in an agricultural community. That's really interesting.

I'm curious if you could say a little bit more about the public-understanding piece. You mentioned earlier that you were, in large part, talking to experts. But you also had focus groups with other folks who didn't have the same types of expertise. How much of a sense did you get that the average person on the street had some sense of what this whole carbon-removal thing was about, whatever the technology might be, and how it might affect their communities?

Holly Buck: Most people haven't heard about this, so in order to have these focus groups, we showed a five-minute video clip produced by Vox which introduces the concept. We picked that video, because it is something that you might find on YouTube if you were watching things. It was for a public audience. And even though it was new for people, people really do understand this stuff and they relate it to their own experiences, or they relate it to other things they know about.

I want to underscore that sometimes we have this idea that these things are technical or complex. They're really not too technical or complex for people, but people are skeptical about this, because they don't see enough progress on the basic energy transition. And so, they have questions about the life-cycle analysis of carbon removal if we haven't even decarbonized yet—really common-sense questions that I think we need to do more as academics to communicate better about.

Daniel Raimi: That makes sense and is also super interesting. I'm curious about that energy-transition part of the conversations. Were most of the folks in your focus groups very enthusiastic about the energy transition and supportive of the need to change the way we produce and consume energy? Or were there folks who didn't want to see changes? I was in central Oklahoma recently, and I talked to a lot of folks who were not particularly bullish about the energy transition, so I'm curious how much variation you saw there across the people you spoke with.

Holly Buck: It seemed like people wanted changes, but a lot of people were definitely skeptical about the costs and the solutions on offer. Electric vehicles, for example, were often perceived to be too costly, or maybe the charging infrastructure was not seen as a fit for, say, rural Maine. Or they'd have questions about the critical minerals and whether they were really green with all the lithium, and they've heard about child mining and all of these things, all of which are really good questions that need to be fully addressed before people are going to be ready to go out and buy an electric vehicle. That's going to take time. I don't think people are against the energy transition, but some of them are against the idea that other people are going to tell them how to live. It really has to be a voluntary adoption.

Daniel Raimi: That totally tracks with things that I've heard, as well, and is super interesting.

Well, Holly Buck from Buffalo and Harvard, thank you so much for coming out to the show and sharing this information. It's really fascinating. Of course, we'll have a link to the working paper in our show notes so people can go dig into the details.

I want to ask you now about a recommendation that you'd like to make for our audience, something that you think is great that is related to the environment, or not. We're actually not very picky. So, Holly, what's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Holly Buck: I'm rereading a book—because it's so good—that came out a little while ago. It’s called Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis, because I think, even though it's not directly about the environment, the dynamics being described are going to be important for scaling up clean energy.

Daniel Raimi: Absolutely. And by “fulfillment,” I assume it's referring to Amazon fulfillment centers or something like that.

Holly Buck: It is, and it uses that to just look at the broader question of deindustrialization and what the new economic basis of our country could or should be.

Daniel Raimi: Really fascinating.

One more time, Holly Buck, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a really fun conversation.

Holly Buck: Thanks for having me.

Daniel Raimi: You’ve been listening to Resources Radio, a podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). If you have a minute, we’d really appreciate you leaving us a rating or comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes.

This podcast is made possible with the generous financial support of our listeners. You can help us continue producing these kinds of discussions on the topics that you care about by making a donation to Resources for the Future online at rff.org/donate.

RFF is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Our mission is to improve our environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the podcast guests and may differ from those of RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. RFF does not take positions on specific legislative proposals.

Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason, with music by me, Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.