um good morning good afternoon everybody i'm david mara with the institute for carbon removal law and policy at american university in washington dc thanks for joining our webinar on public perceptions of carbon removal we are fortunate to be joined here today by caitlin rainey the university of michigan rob bellamy university of manchester and we should be joined uh shortly by leah of the african union commission our webinar today will start with short presentations from each of our speakers followed by discussion between the three of them at any point you can add your questions using the q a feature at the bottom of your zoom screen and we will get to those questions a bit later in the hour caitlyn why don't you take it away all right great um so let me just get myself situated here um so first thanks so much for having uh this event this is uh um exciting to get to talk about public perceptions of carbon removal um so i just wanted to go over a few kind of key themes that i've seen that emerge in the literature on public perceptions of carbon removal and i'll just note one theme is that this has largely been done on publix from the u.s uk europe and australia so um it's not a global public perception of at least in terms of what i'll be talking about here so the first major point is that most people have no perception of carbon removal there is very little public perception of this um studies that have looked at people's um self-reported prior awareness of of carbon removal like have they ever heard of this before the study um find somewhere between like 14 to 20 of people indicating that they've ever heard of this before or that they have um you know at least a fair amount of knowledge um so really this is an area where most people haven't really formed a perception yet so there's a lot of um room to grow there and i'll also know you know in general people tend to overclaim knowledge rather than under claim it so this if anything is probably an exaggeration of people's awareness of this topic when they do hear about it um their support for it varies a lot so they're not as wary of carbon removal as they are of like solar geoengineering but it varies a lot partly based on the technologies that are being talked about so for example one study found that in terms of supporting research on carbon removal somewhere between 40 to 45 percent of people indicated that they supported it and this is a multi-country sample other research has looked at whether people support deployment of carbon removal and it ranges a lot so somewhere there's one study from germany that found 53 of people supported backs but another study from germany found up to 80 of people study uh supported aforestation so again may depend on the strategy being talked about aforestation in general um seems to get more support than some other approaches for reasons that we can talk about um so my next point is that because people have such low knowledge of carbon removal the initial framing of these strategies has a really big impact on how people think about it not surprisingly when you've never heard of something before it the way it's introduced initially has a big effect um so one major frame is how natural things are and i think rob is going to talk about that a bit more so i'll leave that to him um but if other frames that are important are whether or who is in charge so the public generally seems to prefer carbon move removal led by academic scientists rather than for-profit industry who they're a little suspicious of sometimes also framing of the trade-offs so are they being told about the costs and potential risks as well as the benefits of carbon removal not surprisingly that makes a difference and the alternatives that are framed are also super important so is this being talked about just as one alternative um that might you know either take the place or be in addition to things like renewable energy or is it being talked about is like this is the only thing stopgap measure between us and a huge climate crisis an emergency right this is of course going to have a big impact on how people think about um these new approaches another theme that emerges both when experts talk about uh carbon removal and when um the lay public does is fears about moral hazards so everybody when they hear about this or when they talk about this fears that other people will not worry so much about reducing emissions if they learn about carbon removal they think that if other people learn about carbon removal they'll feel like this is a silver bullet that will take care of the problem and then wash the hands of it and don't need to do anything else the empirical work that's looked at moral hazards including my own has been really mixed so we sometimes find that learning about carbon removal can reduce people's threat perceive threat of climate change and in turn reduce emission support emission reduction support um but we don't always find it these aren't robust and they're small effects research in other areas like solar geoengineering sometimes actually finds the opposite effect that it can actually increase support for emission reductions and my own work find that again it's just about framing so if you tell people this is a silver bullet that's going to take care of the problem they believe you and if you tell people this is just a piece of the puzzle then those moral hazard effects start to disappear so again i think this is about how these are described to people the last point i want to make is that um is about a theme that doesn't emerge in carbon removal which is political ideology when we talk about climate change political ideology has a huge impact on people in public perceptions especially in the us and other anglophone countries um people on the on the right and the left have very different perceptions of climate change that does not seem to have leaked into discussions of carbon removal at least not yet and we can talk about why that might be later on but i just wanted to flag that as one major difference when we're talking about carbon removal in particular so with that i'll stop and let other people take the floor thanks caitlin let's turn it over to rob next thanks david and the institute as well for having me it's great to be here okay so uh i'm gonna outline uh three things shaping public perceptions of carbon removal that i think are perhaps less well recognized uh but i think will play an increasingly important role going forward and these are firstly the social construction of nature secondly the socio bit of socio-technical systems and thirdly the co-production of public perceptions research itself so let's start with the social construction of nature one of the most consistent and recurrent findings of public perceptions research on carbon removal has been that people prefer options that are perceived as being natural over options are perceived as being technological or unnatural so people prefer things like afforestation and biochar over things like direct air capture or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage but what's less well recognized is that natural climate solutions aren't some self-evident category what's contained within is something selected by people and here's the problem nature is universal it encapsulates the physical world in its entirety including both untouched nature and nature modified by humans as well as of course humans themselves so any effort to establish some subset of nature as the one true nature will be missing a big part of the picture advocates of natural climate solutions exclude articles manufactured from nature such as direct air capture and storage and low carbon concrete as well as approaches that should fall under their own definition such as ocean alkalinity enhancement and enhanced weathering and then there's more ambiguous approaches that suffer inconsistencies like biochar burial and bex which for example both involve enhancing an existing natural process biomass growth and articles manufactured from nature pyrolysis plants in the case of biochar and power stations combined with carbon capture and storage in the case of vex but biochar is classed as a natural solution and vex is not so we're simultaneously presented with a risk and an opportunity the appeal of nature combined with a restricted set of options risks constraining what are thought of as desirable fundable implementable policy options but an awareness of its social construction gives us an opportunity to for articulating a broader more inclusive understanding of nature that opens up the range of options rather than closing it down which is vital because i think we all recognize that we're going to need everything we can get in order to tackle the climate crisis so next we have what i've called the the socio bit of socio-technical systems public perceptions research on carbon removal in fact on any kind of new technology has long focused on how people view technical characteristics so what's wrong with that well technologies aren't just isolated bits of kit that work on their own their socio-technical systems combinations of technical objects and social arrangements that work together as a single system carbon removal won't work without people procedures policies policy instruments and so on so we're starting to know quite a bit about how people perceive the bits of kit the technical characteristics but very little has been done so far to highlight and understand how people see the other half of socio-technical systems and what has been done shows that it can be decisive so the policy instruments chosen to incentivize uh becks for example have been shown to significantly change the way people perceive the technology itself so unfortunately it's of limited use to say that people think x about a carbon removal approach if we haven't also looked at what people think about its possible implementation contexts and then lastly there's the co-production of public perceptions research itself so this refers to how it's important to not only pay attention to how public perceptions research frames or constructs the objects and the considerations such as carbon removal options and their attendant framings but also to consider how research constructs the public's and procedural formats of public participation as well and in turn how these construct the research public perceptions research has tended to focus on opinion surveys consultations deliberative processes and public dialogues but this misses out on a huge diversity of public participation that's going on all the time around us but the perceptions within each of those remain overlooked so think about activist groups protests artistic engagements action groups cooperatives community groups maker spaces living laboratories and digital engagement to name a few in short public perceptions research is only tapping into a small part of the bigger picture and addressing this will be key if we are to ever fully understand public perceptions of and responsibly develop carbon removal thanks thanks ron now we were hoping to have leah what give a short presentation as well she'd message us right before the webinar started to say she was having some network problems hopefully she will be able to join us and we can drop whatever we're talking about at the moment and have her tell us a bit about how carbon removal is being perceived among policymakers especially within the african union but in the meantime could i invite the two of you caitlyn and rob to say a bit about what you see as the main drivers of public perceptions of carbon removal right now so you've mentioned some of these things but i'd be interested in say top three that could be something you mentioned something the other person mentioned or something that just hasn't come up yet um i mean i think rob's certainly talked about this but i think the nature perceptions isn't is maybe the major um driver right now um i think it's both both in terms of like how official categorizations are given and how the lay public kind of intuitively understands these approaches nature the perception of the naturalness has a huge impact and i think it's not just the perception that any particular approach is natural or tampers with nature but also people's kind of individual differences and how comfortable they are with with nature-based approaches versus non-nature based approaches so people different how much they are scared of things that tamper with the natural world and that independently of how much they think any particular strategy um tampers um affects their support for them so i think that's super important we also you know there's studies that have looked at framing of naturalness and it's a very easy it's a very malleable thing into how natural something is you can describe the same exact process as being natural or not and so that really affects public perceptions um so i think rob's very right to say that these are kind of arbitrary categories both at the kind of expert level but also at the um lay audience level rob yeah that's that's interesting yeah because i was going to say actually in terms of the most uh impactful issue at the moment i was going to pick one of yours caitlyn uh i think i think i i think the nature thing is going to be very very big going forward but i think right now um my sense is that the most significant thing that is starting to shape and could be really impactful going forward is the moral hazard uh issue um just because i think it's being um it's being yeah i mean the whole kind of moral hazard thing's just really coming to the fore at the moment um and uh i mean this isn't to say i i necessarily think it's going to be a big problem in the future i think we we really just need to um allay any of the concerns that people have about that um and i think there's some really useful uh work going on around kind of policy innovations that could kind of go some way to addressing this so duncan mclaren and colleagues for example have proposed separating emissions reductions and removals in terms of policy goals and i think that that kind of stuff really needs to uh come forward and hopefully the policymakers will listen to that and uh and deal with it um but in the meantime there's this there is this very real risk and we can we're already seeing kind of people and companies talking about kind of offsets and things and you know if this space isn't governed properly uh it could lead to a very real risk around moral hazard and i think people will obviously be rightly concerned about that um you go caitlyn yeah no i just to build on that i think there's people talk about moral hazard a lot in a very simplified way with a lot of assumptions i think there's different types of moral hazards there's the kind of what the public how the public's going to react there's how policy makers might trade things off there's um just like actual budgets of where money might go there's lots of different ways that moral hazards could play in but their moral hazard like the framing the language of that assumes it's going in a negative direction but it's a crowding out effect and i actually i'm not sure that that's always the case so we sometimes as i talked about see this like risk um enhancement risk salience kind of effect where people see these things they see that some of them are very costly or some of them might be scary or some of them might be whatever that they don't like and that makes them even more concerned about climate change and want to turn to emission reductions instead and so i don't know that it's always inherently has to be in the kind of reducing support for policies emission reduction policies um i think it's a little bit more nuanced than that um and i think it's important to look at obviously we don't want to talk about something and have it undermine all of the efforts we're doing on climate change but i do fear that it's oversimplified in a way that um i don't know my stymie efforts to even talk about this stuff and communicate and and inform the public about this yeah and that would also link i think to one of your other points about you know political ideology it's interesting how at the moment it's kind of is a little bit open to um you know being shaped in that way i think but you can already kind of see some groups starting to kind of um you know kind of i suppose demonize or kind of advocate uh from particular kind of political standpoint so you can see you can kind of see where this is starting to go at the moment but as you say we're really kind of uh nice point at the moment where we can kind of reflect on on these things and and maybe kind of steer things in a more uh productive direction and hope that it doesn't become uh you know a kind of a partisan issue of some kind because you know at the end of the day you kind of due to kind of the existence of residual emissions and so on we're probably going to have to use some kind of carbon removal and we kind of it wouldn't be very productive to have it uh you know sectioned off as a kind of uh something that we don't want to do yeah i have very little hope that it'll stay un un political i don't think anything stays unpolitical these days but um it hasn't yet devolved into that i mean it's really interesting it's carbon removal and like it's really interesting in that it it can be a technology defined approach and so there's been some research to suggest that that might be more and the people like that who don't like if you don't like big government you don't want the policy approaches that maybe something that sounds like it's kind of more of a techie approach is going to be more appealing and so some initial work suggested that that appeal to hierarchical individualists who tend to be more politically conservative for example um but those studies are like really it's like almost like setting up a moral hazard they explicitly say like this is in lieu of doing the policies they're not setting it up as like this is an addition and so i think in a real world situation where these things are coupled i'm not sure that that will will take off and it's quite the same way i don't know that that'll be quite so appealing to um people on the political right as it might be in without that context yeah the in the u.s of course is a particularly interesting uh context for these kind of polarizing discussions i mean in the in the uk for example i think uh it's a lot less of a i mean climate change is a lot less of a partisan issue there are some kind of uh issues but it's not not anywhere near as significant um so that's another another kind of key key dimension here of course is you know how carbon removal is going to be perceived uh and received in in different uh different countries um and if leo joins us then it'd be great to kind of hear about the uh the perspective of the global south as well because um as caitlyn mentioned like pretty much all of the there have been some exceptions but most of the research done in this space is focused on uh you know people from the us or the uk and maybe europe as well um yeah and then there's also a kind of separate discussion that's kind of a personal interest to me which is the extent to which there are differences or which is which is bigger the kind of differences between countries or the differences within countries so caitlin you mentioned the uh you know how individualists for example can be might be more prone to being open to these kinds of technologies so obviously you have individualists in in different countries as well so it's kind of maybe they have more in common with each other than [Music] um yeah the kind of differences between countries so there was a couple of other things i just wanted to highlight though so following on from from what i was saying the um think going forward um when it comes to this nature issue i think we've got this we've got this kind of risk and opportunity um where you know if things carry on as they are then we're kind of faced with a situation where we've got this um area of what being described as natural climate solutions which you know are imbued with this kind of um higher level of public acceptance and it was going to risk this kind of constraining of policy options i think going forward and that's before you get on to all of those issues around um you know monitoring verification and reporting and and the kind of impermanence of the storage around some of those techniques um but what i would really like to see is that it's kind of as challenging this on the one hand the way in which experts are kind of framing this new category but also from a kind of public perceptions research point of view um i'm quite interested because caitlyn you mentioned that um you know there is a kind of popular understanding of of nature as well uh which in my mind is kind of a legacy of of romanticism so we've got this kind of this incumbent uh perception of nature almost that that kind of needs to be revisited i think but it's whether or not we can overcome that is a uh is another matter thanks that'll make a good segue to one of our audience questions so i want to turn shortly to those questions for the audience members if you have questions that you would like caitlyn or rob or hopefully leah to be able to answer go ahead and add them in that q a box and we will get to them shortly before we do that there is one question i wanted to ask you to following on things you both talked about which is about how long these framing effects last right so if i don't know anything about carbon removal and i read an article that describes enhanced weathering as accelerating the natural process by which rocks take carbon out of the air how long does that effect last is it are we talking like days weeks months forever is it reversible and how does this work i think that's a good question um by which i mean i don't have a clear answer for you um i think it depends on the context a lot so we know about for framing about climate change where there is a lot of information that people are exposed to all the time the framing effects really don't seem to last super long there because they're immediately kind of overturned by alternative information um and so you know they can nudge people a little bit for a short amount of time but then they kind of get overrun i think if you're talking about enhanced weathering and somebody's hearing about this and they're not hearing anything else about it for weeks and that may stay with them until however long until they hear something else and it could become even more sticky because then it's been there for longer and it's been kind of deeply ingrained as their first impression and we know people's first impressions are maybe the most impactful um so i think for carbon removal especially things that are less familiar like enhanced weathering um that that can really can be pretty sticky for a while um especially right now when people haven't heard about it i think once we get into a situation where these things are being debated and talked about a lot more and people are reading lots of stories about it i think then any framing effects are going to be a lot you're going to get diminishing returns there yeah yeah i completely agree with caitlyn there i think that you know the duration aspect is is key um which is why we it's really important that we kind of have these conversations now um although of course when it comes to the nature thing as i say it's kind of at least in the public imagination it's kind of a legacy of this kind of this romanticism which has been around for centuries uh so i think uh you know how long does does that framing effect last very long time uh are we going to be able to get over it i don't know i really like i would really like to be able to uh and you know it's a personal research uh interest of mine to try and try and do that um so it's in a way it's a kind of an empirical question i think and as caitlyn says it depends on the context great so we do actually have an audience question about this nature tech divide asking how this has changed over time and why i'm guessing that mark has a less long-term question in mind here so it's not about romanticism it's about you know the last probably 10 15 years or so how have perceptions about nature versus technological carbon removal changed why and to what extent are we seeing efforts to shift that successful or not well yeah so i think the uh yeah i mean the the emergence of this has been really in the last few years um so we were having a little discussion just before this uh webinar started uh where i was just reflecting on how um you know the terminology has changed over the last decade or so so if you look back to 2009 uh you know the geo engineering kind of burst onto the scene uh which historically is a kind of on the one hand you've got solar geo engineering technologies on the other hand you've got carbon removal stuff and then a few years later you kind of have this this decoupling that um it's largely complete at this point i think where people are kind of when people say geo engineering they most of the time they mean solar geo engineering um but then uh we're seeing another split as well uh so around about it was 2017 there was this key article by griska mattel on natural climate solutions which was really the first point at which this uh separation between the the natural and the kind of technological carbon removal started so again we're seeing we're starting to see another split within carbon removal um so it's been uh it's quite recent this this natural thing and also i've noticed in in some circles that i walk in that people are starting to just put natural climate solutions in with this broader nature based solutions category uh which is not just about carbon removal that also includes kind of mitigation and adaptation options as well um but yeah so there's that split going on and i think you know eventually we'll get to a point where we can start talking about the merits of individual technologies which is where things need to be going i think rather than having these high-level discussions about kind of big groups of technologies which of which the criticisms and um evaluations are some sometimes hold but there's often big differences between the individual approaches that really need to be to be drawn out so what was the last part of that question about efforts to change the perceptions our weapons to change yeah okay so nothing really has been done as far as i'm aware to try and change that apart from some kind of studies well there's been some interesting studies have looked at uh the impacts of you know framing things as natural or otherwise but this is something that's really well established now i think everybody knows that if you frame something as natural it's going to be perceived as being better but what really interests me and what i want to try and do uh in the next few years to try and uh you know change the way people think about that what i really want to do is to redirect people to evaluating these technologies and approaches on their merits rather than under this kind of label of nature because nature the way when nature's invoked it kind of imbues it with this uh you know sense of moral authority or and it protects it from proper scrutiny because it's kind of you know people you know people like things that are natural i mean who's who's against nature right so it's what would be really nice is to focus on you know the specific reasons why we would or wouldn't want to do any of these these approaches i think rob covered most of it but i'll just add on to say that i think i think the nature framing like the importance of that is is likely to dissipate as as tech approaches get actually used on the ground we see a lot of like you know people think in terms of values and morals and ideologies when they're talking about abstract comments uh constructs but when we're when it's actually brought on the ground and there's like local decisions being made about like sighting is there going to be um you know enhanced weathering going on in my area is there going to be uh reforestation going on on my land like that then people take different approaches to decision making and focus much more on the concrete like what is this going to mean for my bottom line what is this going to be mean for my personal health or my family's health like those sorts of things become much more important and the larger values become less much less of a driver so i think like as things get more real and more local the priorities might change a bit and the focus on these kind of big abstract ideas i think will become less important and the focus on money and land and local politics will become much more important thanks what what do we know at the moment about how carbon removal is being framed in public discourse so we've talked a bit about how people respond to different kinds of messages but do we know what kind of messages people are currently getting about carbon removal that's a good question um yeah i mean i suppose it depends on which circles you're moving in i mean in in my circles it tends to be this kind of moral hazard thing um so people are kind of you get people saying you know the kind of critics kind of saying oh it's a risk to uh reducing emissions which at the moment it is you know without these kind of policy innovations um [Music] i mean i think certainly within kind of uh you know from the research community uh i think as caitlyn said already you know i think i don't think anybody really presents these things as being an alternative to mitigation um so that's a really kind of positive thing i think coming out of the research community it's always kind of emphasized that it's you know it's it's additional um you know mitigate mitigate first uh and as you know as much and as fast as you can and then whatever's left you kind of mop up with the with carbon removal so i think from the research community that i don't know i'd maybe dare to go as far as to say that was a universal kind of framing from the research community um but then yeah because start starts becoming more complicated when you get out into stakeholder communities and um you know i think uh yeah from the critics point of view they're kind of emphasizing this this risk that it might become a moral hazard and then and then you've got kind of companies like like fossil fuel companies who are kind of talking about these offsets and things and maybe aren't you know as uh tuned to the concerns as they should be yeah i would just add that most people are not hearing about this at all so um i think that's the biggest the biggest thing is people just aren't really hearing about this um and if they are they maybe are seeing ads from exxon about offset sort of ccs rather than carbon removal in a permanent kind of way um so um yeah okay uh thanks we've got a set of questions from a bunch of different audience members uh circling around sort of specific issues associated with either carbon removal in general or particular approaches and they're wondering how these things affect uh or might affect people's perceptions of carbon removal so i i think i might just sort of give you a list here of things that people have raised and you can pick or choose or ask me what else was on the list so things that people have raised geological sequestration and concerns about the safety of geological sequestration people want to know how the idea of say carbon trading might affect public perceptions especially around issues of say the difficulty of accounting for carbon trading right so are they sort of real offsets that sort of concern questions about side effects uh caitlin alluded to this in in talking about what happens when sort of things become less abstract and more concrete and those could include both physical side effects but also what you might think of as social side effects someone mentioned say land grabs in the global south um questions about enhanced oil recovery right this process where you take captured carbon dioxide and inject it into oil and gas wells to enhance production and environmental justice either in the context of ej concerns for particular carbon removal projects or sort of climate change itself as an environmental justice issue and the connection to uh carbon removal if people in the audience have other sort of specific issues in this area that they want to ask caitlin and rob about go ahead and drop them in the q a and i'll add them to the list so it's a bunch of things pick and choose uh what you think is most sort of interesting or important or what you have the most to say about i don't have answers for most of those i'm getting great ideas for studies um i'd say a couple things that i flagged so i think enhanced oil recovery anything that is related to the oil industry in this space i think people are often very suspicious of um and for good reason um and and so i think anytime any oil industry action whether it's enhanced oil recovery or ads about um carbon capture whatever i think people have an initial aversion to and that is going to decrease support for any of those approaches um again the like academic scientists doing this because it's seen as more neutral and not you know there's not some ulterior motive that's that's causing this so i think that's one um area that i see um for some of the other stuff in terms of side effects and environmental justice concerns i think it really depends on which part of the process we're talking about um i think people are likely to have different concerns about different links on the chain so um this is not carbon removal in terms of carbon like what we've been talking about but i have been doing some work on um products ccu products carbon capture um being used to create products and looking at focus groups on people's perceptions of those which again these are products that get used so there's a there's lots of links there people get really worried about health impacts both in terms of how these things are created um and in terms of like the products themselves people sometimes worry about like carbon leaking out of them in the same way they might worry about leaking out of like a geological um sequestration and so i think they're they're definitely some health fears that are kind of you know not well formed but just kind of big ideas that maybe something could happen here that could be dangerous um but also real concerns if we're thinking about kind of point source capture or other things that are tied again to industrial processes people worry that there's could be you know the communities around those industries could be affected and so i think any any kind of the creation of any carbon capture um whether it's for permanent storage or use i think um where those are located and the who the communities are around there is going to affect a lot about how much people are worried about side effects there and you know that those fears could be real or imagined but both of those would have impacts on on whether that those are supported in those communities or surrounding communities yeah i just decade what caitlyn was saying really i think there's there's quite a lot of interesting uh future research questions in there particularly around the the environmental justice issue i think um you know this is a kind of a relatively um new kind of voice that's been given a lot more of a platform in recent years i think it'd be very interesting to see you know how kind of carbon removal is seen from an environmental justice point of view but also you know how can uh carbon removal would be imbued with carbon as with uh environmental justice values as well so it's all part and parcel of this approach of you know how can we you know given the fact that we probably are going to have to do carbon removal in some form how how can we do that responsibly um yeah so i would say just just a couple of things uh so the geological sequestration question uh is an interesting one this is something that kind of often crops up around uh bio energy with carbon capture and storage and direct air carbon capture and storage both of which of course use the geological storage uh mechanism so it's a concern with both of those um and it also links to another um kind of thing that kind of circulates around perceptions of carbon removal and new technologies and that is the uh the issue of analogies so people often draw on analogies to make sense of of new new technologies and things that they're not familiar with um so when it comes to things that use geological second restoration uh what people have found is that people often draw on their knowledge and experiences of nuclear power and radioactive waste disposal so they think about you know how long you know if you remove this carbon from the air how long are we going to have to keep it sequestered for um and you know concerns about the safety of that storage how permanent is it of course it is a lot a lot more permanent in theory than uh the uh some of the natural climate solutions but people are concerned about uh kind of leakages and things like that um and then side effects so this is probably the big one i think for carbon removal um aside from the kind of the moral hazard issue at this point i think most people are really uh you know once they've been told about these approaches um people start getting a bit concerned about some of the potential side effects so some of the classic ones you already mentioned david about you know kind of land use uh issues when for things that require large land areas like um well i was going to give an example then actually but i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna challenge this because um one of the big assumptions around carbon removal uh has been that you have to do it at an absolutely crazy scale uh and that's not necessarily true um so uh interestingly uh you know you've got the ipcc scenarios uh on uh you know meeting 1.5
degrees and things like that and uh and of course one of the big controversies around that is that the scenarios actually meet uh the paris agreement goals rely on a huge amount of carbon dioxide removal and and not just kind of you know any carbon dioxide removal specifically bio energy with carbon capture and storage that accounts for more than half of the amount of carbon removal and then also a huge amount of aforestation as well so the two approaches that have been included in those scenarios are both both involve huge amounts of land area i think someone uh runs somewhere at some point that uh you know the amount of bio energy you'd have to produce you know cover the size of india or something in order to meet the paris agreement goals but of course it doesn't have to be that way you know we could we could mitigate but more importantly uh you know in the real world i don't think anybody's going to implement specs on the scale of you know covering india in bio biomass it's just it's just not going to happen uh so you know these critiques about land area you have to be mindful uh of it being kind of set up in a kind of straw managed kind of way um that's not to say that there aren't land uh use issues there are wherever it would be deployed but you know pretty unlikely it's going to be done on the scale that is envisaged in the integrated assessment models um but then interestingly you've got some of the more controversial approaches um particularly on the the marine carbon removal side of things you've got uh probably the most uh uh hated of all of the carbon removal options i think is ocean iron fertilization um which has been roundly condemned by members of the public and i think most researchers in this area as well have come to see this as an option that's technically you know it hasn't really been proven that it can store that much carbon uh in the first place but also whether it can keep it there um and that's before you get onto these side effects issues around kind of you know toxic algal blooms impacts on marine food web dynamics and then changes to ocean chemistry and things like that um so some of these are more kind of concerning than others in terms of their impacts um but i think you know as people start learning more about these things these impacts or potential impacts will start coming to the fore more i think just one other point to add on into the environmental justice conversation is that i think this is one reason why it's so important that the global south be included in these conversations because you know the research that we're drawing on to think about what are people concerned about for environmental justice concerns are from people in largely the u.s and uk and that's going to be very different concerns than people in kenya or india or brazil and so i think we really need to both in terms of the amount that people are concerned about the things that we've identified but also other things that we haven't yet identified because we've been looking at particular subsets of the population i think is super important as we consider this especially like whose land are we going to be using and where might these things be happening so i think really vital to have that as part of the conversation uh that's a nice segue katelyn to one of the other questions here and before i ask that one i just want to flag one sort of point of intersection between the ej conversation and something we talked about earlier uh one of the big concerns that a lot of ej advocates have connects directly to moral hazard and the environmental justice implications of continued fossil fuel use and so it's not just about what happens um from particular carbon removal projects or about the ways those could contribute positively to reducing the ej impacts of climate change but there's also this concern about how any moral hazard effect as it's usually conceived would perpetuate the environmental injustices associated with fossil fuel use the question i want to segue to here is that uh is about this point of including a broader array of publics in public perception research what katelyn just raised and the questioner asks does this consideration of public groups change our understandings of nature or the moral hazard problem or any other dimensions on carbon removal and i'd like to slot in another question here asking not necessarily about different publics but different pieces of public so there's a question about different generations and their responses to framing issues so how might we expect things to change as we look at a broader array of publics or at different slices of those publics i think i think they would it would absolutely change i it's hard for me to really anticipate how um because we don't have those voices yet i mean even within the populations we study so like even within the us we know that some some groups think of environmental issues very differently than others so there's a great paper looking at what counts as an environmental issue finding within the u.s sample that like what white people think is an environmental issue is different than what black or latinx or asian communities think of as a an environmental issue what counts as part of that process is going to be different um and so i think the same is likely to be true for carbon removal and for probably any other topic that different people are going to have different perspectives they're going to interpret terms differently their values are going to be different the analogies that they're drawing on are going to be different and so all of those are going to affect their perceptions in ways that you know as somebody from my particular perspective and who's done research on particular populations i don't feel like i can actually anticipate without having to actually ask them yeah i just seconded that really i mean yeah how are uh how how might things change as we include more publics um it's an empirical question uh i think you know once we start kind of broadening out to include all those different different voices then the picture will start to start to change um and then how will things change as people as more publics are included uh you know substantively in terms of you know the perceptions i don't think we can anticipate that too much at this point but what we can say is that um as a result of including all of those voices um you're gonna have what we call a more socially robust uh kind of platform from which to make decisions um because of course all of these these perceptions are kind of feeding into decision-making and influencing kind of how people how policymakers make their selections and things and this was this is my concern about the kind of the natural framing of courses that you know the policy makers think everybody likes these this subset of natural climate solutions then we might end up um disproportionately kind of putting our eggs in those baskets um but yeah so it's all about kind of um making making more robust decisions i think and including those different voices will help with that so we need more research and more researchers in more places yes i know typically you're supposed to end with saying and we need more research but we have more questions and more time so um let's try to fit in at least a few more of these here someone asks about parallels from perception research in biomedical engineering so synthetic biology for instance on the debate of this nature versus tech trade-off i wonder if you know of any uh or can comment on any parallels there or if you have other parallels you want to mention that would be great too so i've done some work looking at people's underlying like base level discomfort with tampering with natural things in general so and they're tied together so people's fears about synthetic biology or nanoparticles or vaccines or um geoengineering or pesticides all anything that people see as tampering with nature and there's like this underlying core fear that kind of moves around regardless of the context that that drives some decisions there um obviously contacts are going to be different for for you know medical situations where people are putting things into their body versus environmental um situations where it's not um but i do think there's like some some things you tend to move to move around together and then there's kind of fluctuation around that based on the context so i do think these things can be connected anything to out there yeah and i just i'd reiterate that point yeah make nature kind of it's a big theme in all of these kind of things and um you know there's a whole bunch of stuff that um you know when it comes to public perceptions research um you know the gold standard is kind of going out and talking to people about these things but there is also quite a significant body of literature that's looked at you know how people perceive technologies and approaches in kind of different situations and there's certain things that kind of keep cropping up uh across all of these different approaches so we know there's kind of sets of common concerns that people have about new technologies and um and things so you know just for example there's tons of these things um but just for example another one is encapsulation so you know whether or not something release releases materials into the environment people tend not to like things that release materials they prefer kind of black box self-contained kind of approaches but there's a very long list of kind of things like that where we know that people tend to think about new things in certain ways great um in the last few minutes we we have one question asking about studies on framing carbon removal what i might do there is ask each of you after the webinar to send me uh say top five studies you would recommend that people read and we'll put those in an email out to everyone who had registered for the webinar um there is also a question asking if you know of available resources for messaging best practices especially based on audience in the carbon removal space anything off the top of your head if not we can add that to a email as well messaging yeah i don't think anyone's come up with a resource uh for this but it's an interesting question i think it depends on your your goals of course and what you're trying to achieve from my kind of perspective i think you can probably guess what i'm going to say which is to try and avoid the the natural framing unless of course you want people to like it without properly scrutinizing it in which case you use it all you like yeah unfortunately i feel i think this this area is still new enough that there haven't been robust best it hasn't yet gotten out of the academic um literature into the like best practices for um for communicators out in the world um but now you're making us feel like we need to do that all right um and one last question is that's common here that um we can answer quickly uh we've been talking about sort of a layperson's perception of carbon removal and one audience member asks how much influence the layperson's understanding has on the implementation of the tech i think there are certainly examples where lay people have formed activist groups that have had huge impacts on what other technology is um dispersed or how easily it's dispersed sometimes it's overridden but with a lot of resistance so um you know see there's examples of things like you know 5g being opposed or people posing um you know transmission lines because of fears about health impacts of those that that really get in the way of policymakers or industry who are trying to implement these technologies um so i think it depends on what people do with their perceptions if they're really motivated to act on them and and try and push back against uh things that they see happening that they don't approve of or push for things that they are very excited about um you know there are other things that people may have opinions about but they aren't don't see it as priority enough to act on and so carbon removal may fit into those um but we see it in all sorts of places related to to climate change as well so things like wind turbines being imposed in communities that don't want them to obscure their view or whatever so i think i think it can um these public perceptions can have a big impact especially again when we get to the sighting level of like is this going to be allowed in this particular community or on this particular land yeah exactly um you know i'd look at uh you know all the various examples analogous examples of other technologies that have been coming forward over the years and come across uh you know public opposition or things like that you know there's history's replete with examples of technologies that have had a a problematic entry into society um and uh you know i think nuclear energy is another interesting one um we've already mentioned how uh people think about that in terms of the geological sequestration stuff um uh but also i just i just point back to this uh this at this point that it's not kind of just about the technology it's about the implementation context as well um so in the uk we've got an example of um there's a new patent nuclear power station uh called hinckley point that's been coming forward for a while um and there's quite a lot of public opposition around that um not just because it's nuclear but also because of the way in which it's being done uh which is with um a particular kind of policy instrument um that has placed a huge burden on the public taxpayer so there's lessons to be learned there i think all right great that does bring us to the end of our hour uh this webinar has been recorded it will be posted to our website carbonremoval.info that's carbon removal all one word dot info where you'll be able to find this webinar and our previous webinars and learn about upcoming webinars and about the institute for carbon removal law and policy in general i'd like to thank both of our panelists today kaitlyn rainey of the university of michigan and rob bellamy from the university of manchester uh we're very sorry that we were not able to be joined by lanamov the african union commission today we will try to find a way to share her perspective with you as well thanks to all of you for your time and attention and i hope you all have a good day
2021-07-23