Coalition Statement on Carbon Storage’s Role in Meeting Climate Targets 

This statement can be attributed to Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, a nonpartisan collaboration of more than 100 companies, labor unions, and nonprofits working to build support for the necessary portfolio of carbon management policies.  

“Unfortunately, much of the recent media coverage of a new study published in the journal Nature has missed the forest for the trees and rehashes a tired trope that frames emissions reduction solutions as competing with, rather than being complementary to, one another. This error highlights a fundamental, broader misunderstanding of the function and goals of carbon management technologies that the Coalition has been working for years to correct – namely, the idea that carbon management represents the ‘total solution’ to climate change. 
 
“Both the IEA Net Zero Roadmap and the IPCC make it clear that carbon management is an essential emissions mitigation and removal strategy, but also that it is only one of the available tools in the toolbox. IPCC uses seven specific pathways to illustrate a host of economywide decarbonization strategies, only one of which excludes carbon capture. This one pathway requires global energy demand to decrease by nearly 50 percent by midcentury, precisely the opposite of the current trajectory for global energy demand.  

“In coverage of the Nature story, it has been suggested that the carbon management sector has equated the amount of available geologic storage with the amount we should store. Put another way, it suggests that carbon capture and removal could (and therefore should) offset 5 to 6°C of warming. No credible source within the carbon management sector has ever made that claim.  

“Despite headlines to the contrary, the Nature study determined that even at highly conservative estimates, the available carbon storage space worldwide is sufficient to store emissions above and beyond what any organization has said would be necessary to fulfill carbon management’s complementary role as an emissions reduction strategy.  

“For context, the Coalition has always maintained: 

• Carbon capture and removal are not a silver bullet to mitigating climate change. 

• The US has the geological storage capacity to store hundreds of years of emissions safely, and robust regulations are in place. 

• Carbon management technologies are one piece of a broader mitigation strategy, not the total or only solution.  

“Carbon management is not and has never claimed to be ‘a way out of the climate crisis,’ as the Nature study’s lead author stated. Instead, it is one more tool that can help mitigate a changing climate when combined with other efforts.  

“Unfortunately, much of the coverage about the study reflects a long-standing misinterpretation of the carbon management sector. The Coalition rejects pitting solutions against one another and instead advocates continuing to work on scaling carbon management technologies to widen the suite of available technologies to meet climate targets.” 

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The Carbon Capture Coalition (the Coalition) is a nonpartisan collaboration of more than 100 companies, labor unions, and conservation and environmental policy organizations. Coalition members work together to lay the groundwork for the necessary portfolio of federal policies to enable nationwide, commercial-scale deployment of carbon management technologies.