by Stephanie Rose Cortinovis and Burgess Langshaw Power
Insider Brief:
- Municipalities are already responsible for managing local waste materials. It is possible to expand this definition to include carbon, and allow municipalities to take responsibility for carbon management.
- DACCS technologies require substantial investment to bring the price down – enlisting cities throughout Canada to adopt this technology for waste management would help make this technology more affordable.
- Municipalities are already the major drivers of climate tech adaptation and implementation. Adding carbon management would not only provide cities with more resources, but would make it easier for other entities to use carbon capture technology.
Carbon removal ought to be treated like waste management, several experts have argued. Could this CDR work as a waste management approach for Canadian municipalities?
CDR development needs to think long-term
The IPCC has been clear that to meet our climate targets, we need to deploy technologies like direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) at scale. Although nature-based carbon sequestration will also contribute to global carbon dioxide removal (CDR) needs, most of these options are incapable of scaling removals to the extent necessary without putting undue pressure on other earth systems. They also do not permanently (on the scale of thousands of years) remove CO2 from the carbon cycle through durable carbon storage.
DACCS technologies generally pose minimal environmental risks and can be coupled with long-term geological CO2 storage, but they are currently underdeveloped, resource-intensive, and expensive, which poses challenges to scaling them up.
While selling high-quality carbon credits may make some DACCS projects profitable, it’s crucial to develop long-term solutions and technology for DACCS. Federal policies in Canada, like the investment tax credit and draft DACCS offset protocol, highlight this urgency.
Additionally, since CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for centuries, DACCS will be essential post-decarbonization. Relying on offset sales for financing CDR will not support a sustainable post-net-zero business model.
Reframing DACCS in a municipal context
The long-term risks of climate change call for rethinking the scale of carbon management tools like DACCS, especially given their high up-front costs. If today’s waste management systems were proposed, they’d likely face criticism for cost and free-ridership issues, despite clear social benefits. Professor Holly Jean Buck suggests reframing CDR as a waste management issue, drawing parallels to the social values and technological demand created by the sanitation movement since the 19th century.
As municipalities already handle liquid and solid waste in Canada, perhaps gaseous waste should be managed similarly. While the localized impacts of solid and liquid waste versus gaseous waste are compelling motivators, high global greenhouse gas concentrations also harm the human health and ecosystems.
Shifting CDR from a commercial to a government-run service wouldn’t solve all deployment issues (e.g., cost, permanent storage, greenwashing), but reframing CO2 as ‘waste’ could establish a new kind of climate action role for local governments and an alternative business model for technology developers.
Taking on services which are socially necessary but economically inefficient is, in fact, one of the key roles of government.
Though municipalities aren’t currently required to provide this service, they may voluntarily take on the challenge if social pressures and economic co-benefits can make a compelling case.
If one city starts funding the removal of a portion of their emissions (or ‘atmospheric waste’), it could set a precedent. Together, large cities could push for DACCS development and help lower costs for others.
DACCS developers can strengthen their position by highlighting economic and environmental co-benefits for cities and exploring various engagement pathways, as outlined in a report by XPrize, South Pole, and the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, co-developed with several major municipal climate alliances. The report emphasizes cities’ role in facilitating cooperation and supporting DACCS through co-ownership and public-private partnerships.
Economies of scale are crucial for making DACCS cost-effective, but municipalities cannot fund it alone. Combining municipal, provincial, and federal funds in the early stages could lower prices, establish niche markets, support early technology development, and create a post-net-zero business model.
Strategically diversifying DACCS deployment models
The structural makeup of a system matters. Ensuring a multiplicity of DACCS approaches, both in terms of financing and technological diversity, could create a global CDR network more capable of adapting under changing conditions.
Moreover, deliberately creating modularity — that is, the extent to which parts of a system as units independently of the whole — in technology deployment could also make DACCS systems more resilient to changing political climates, or other kinds of shocks.
Designing these systems is not just a matter of reducing technology costs and accessing renewable energy and carbon storage;. Rather, it is about reinforcing policy mandates for climate action at multiple governance levels, and creating new, local level constituencies of people and financers with vested interests in the scaling-up of DACCS.
Threats to long-term climate action strategies
The rollback of state-level climate mitigation agendas is already looming. Federal climate action is on the ballot in Canada, with calls to eliminate the existing carbon pricing system.
In parallel, the new U.S. administration has committed to scaling up domestic oil and gas production, despite the growing market share of renewable energy and electric vehicles globally.
Provincial governments control key decarbonization levers, like electricity production and carbon storage regulation. But, municipalities can influence zoning, land use, carbon pricing (indirectly through bylaws and policy), community energy projects, social acceptance of new technologies, and public infrastructure, including renewable energy.
Several federal programs support community-level climate action, which municipalities could use to develop large-scale removal projects with tech developers.
We advocate expanding these programs to finance and coordinate DACCS hubs, similar to US initiatives or those being developed by private firms, like the Canadian-financed carbon removal infrastructure Deep Sky, who would benefit from access to government resources and funding.
Municipalities, with federal and provincial support, should expand waste management mandates to include CO2 and develop DACCS infrastructure as part of their long-term climate strategies. This presents a promising opportunity to create a space for functional, community-based technology development in an emerging industry that experts expect to grow exponentially in the coming decades.
