Heilbroner Center Visiting Scholar June Sekera (Public Economy) is launching a new project on carbon capture and sequestration, supported by a $75,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The principal product will be a “dashboard” tool for policymakers that displays the resource costs and environmental impacts for a range of approaches to atmospheric carbon reduction. The aim of the dashboard is to convert complexity into simplicity, using data and metrics to create a decision support tool so that policymakers can easily see the biophysical effects of their decisions in terms of resource usage, biophysical impacts and potential benefits and harms for frontline communities.
As the impacts of climate change become more visible and dramatic, calls for government funding of “carbon dioxide removal” are growing. The U.S. Congress and many other governments are acting. Under a previous grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund, Sekera and New School PhD candidate Andreas Lichtenberger analyzed the scientific literature on carbon capture from a public policy perspective, using a lens of “collective biophysical need.” Their findings were published in October 2020 in the journal Biophysical Economics and Sustainability: “Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science and Societal Need; A review of the literature on industrial carbon removal.”
Their research revealed that the carbon capture methods being subsidized by the U.S. government are largely counter-productive: the methods authorized can actually put more carbon into the air than they remove. Under the banner of climate change mitigation, these subsidies for commercial carbon capture also include oil extraction, thereby providing further taxpayer underwriting of oil production and prolonging fossil fuel use.
The new project will gather data on biological methods of carbon sequestration and array the metrics on both biological and industrial methods using infographics so that the differences in resource usage and environmental impacts can be quickly and easily discerned.