Scrubbing the Sky - Episode 4 - Skeptics vs Believers: Is Direct Air Capture Hope or Hype?

Host Ed Whittingham closes out Season 1 by examining the case against Direct Air Capture by one its harshest critics, Al Gore, followed by the counterarguments of supporters. Will DAC live up to its hype and potential to help cool a warming planet? 

Guests include: 

• Greg Nemet, professor at the University of Wisconsin
• Klaus Lackner, professor at Arizona State University
• David Keith, professor at the University of Chicago and a DAC pioneer who founded the company Carbon Engineering
• Sara Hastings-Simon, professor at the University of Calgary
• Christian Theuer, Policy Communications Lead at Heirloom
• Jim McDermott, co-founder and the managing partner of Rusheen Capital Management, LLC
• Éric St-Pierre, Executive Director of the Trottier Family Foundation

Learn more at www.scrubbingthesky.com

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Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts.

The podcast is part of the Carbon Herald’s podcast network.

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Transcript

Ed Whittingham: It's 2003. Former U. S. Vice President Al Gore is holding court in New York at the annual UN Climate Week. He answers a question about direct air capture, otherwise known as DAC. 

[00:00:14] Al Gore: Direct air capture? 

Huh? That's a really hilarious technology. So yeah, I support research, but there is a big difference between a research program And a deceptive lie to publics around the world that this is ready to go and what it means is we can keep burning fossil fuels forever.

Isn't it obvious what's happening? Do they take us for fools? 

[00:00:41] Ed Whittingham: Perhaps dear listener, you're thinking, that's a provocative statement for a podcast on direct air capture to use in its opening. After all, the speaker is none other than The Gorical himself. He of the Inconvenient Truth fame. The most influential piece of climate narrative in our time.

But if direct air capture is hilarious, then what's the punchline? With the pace of the changing climate and the political headwinds that DAC and other climate mitigation technologies are suddenly facing from the Trump administration in 2025, which are no joke, we'll soon find out.

Welcome to Scrubbing the Sky, a podcast series about the race to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. at a planetary scale. This first season focuses on direct air capture, also known as DAC, one of the leading technology pathways to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. For those companies that can successfully bring this technology to market, well, it could be a massive windfall.

And for the planet, it could help avert disaster.

At the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Known as COP 28, an agreement was reached that signaled the, quote, beginning of the end, unquote, of the fossil fuel era. It was a welcome surprise for well known climate crusader Al Gore, who had been skeptical that a meaningful outcome from the conference was possible.

While there, he expressed concern about carbon capture, storage and utilization technologies, or CCUS, and direct air capture. Referring to them as research projects overhyped by fossil fuel companies. Gore's concern was that investment capital would be diverted away from more established clean energy technologies like renewable energy.

He quickly became arguably the most prominent critic of direct air capture technology. When, in August 2023, he gave a TED talk that was uncharacteristically blistering. 

[00:02:46] Al Gore: It's called direct air, uh, capture. You know what it's used for? It's useful to give them an excuse for not ever stopping oil. Some people call that a moral hazard. For them, the moral hazard is not a bug, it's a feature, as the old saying goes. 

[00:03:03] Ed Whittingham: Al Gore is worried that DAC and other carbon removal technologies could represent a get out of jail free card to companies and consumers to burn fossil fuels forever. That's commonly referred to as the moral hazard problem, and you'll get no disagreement from me about it being a risk.

Much like the popular mantra around recycling, the first principle is to reduce, as in getting CO2 emissions as close to zero as possible, and holding all parties, governments, companies, and individuals, accountable to that imperative. The common refrain in carbon removal circles is, do your best, Remove the rest.

Gore went on to show a picture of a project built by Climeworks in Iceland. The photo is of the backside of the contactors, stacked air conditioning like units that suck air across filters. 

[00:03:54] Al Gore: So let's just look at it. This is state of the art. Looks pretty impressive, doesn't it? They're improving this and the new model, seven years from now, each of these machines is going to be able to capture 27 seconds worth of annual emissions.

[00:04:11] Ed Whittingham: Now, with all due respect to The Gorical, there is some mischaracterization on his part here. The direct air capture unit he was referring to, a Climeworks project we covered previously, called Mammoth, is indeed expected to capture a relatively tiny, 36, 000 tons of CO2 per year, but Climeworks business plan has always been to start small with modular units that can be steadily scaled up and optimized along the way.

As we heard from David Keith, this is in contrast to the plausibly more difficult undertaking, starting with a large scale plant like Occidentals and 1. 5 Stratos Project built with carbon engineering technology as a way to benefit from economies of scale right out of the gate. Two companies. taking two different approaches to solve the same problem.

Gore has touted the stunning cost reductions in solar and wind generation, battery storage, and electric vehicles that combined are a big factor behind why the world is now spending two trillion dollars per year Now, the same may also prove true for direct air capture. Climeworks is aiming for a cost below 300 per ton of CO2 by 2050, down from 1, 000 per ton with their current demonstration plans.

Dr. Greg Nemet. Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison writes about clean tech cost declines and learning curves in his book, How Solar Energy Became Cheap, a Model for Low Carbon Innovation. He spoke to us about his book a few seasons ago on Energy vs Climate.

[00:05:45] Greg Nemet: If you think of the number of units produced, like that's a pretty simple metric.

How many solar panels we've ever built, it's like 3 billion probably now. And if you think about wind turbines, it's probably 3 million. And if you think of things like nuclear reactors, it's less than a thousand. And just think of All the chances you have to do better, to incorporate some new production, uh, technology, to maybe make changes, to make mistakes and recover from them.

Um, so I think that, we sometimes call it modularity or granularity, uh, has been crucial for solar, because you have all these iterations to make it get better. For other technologies that maybe can't use the solar model, let's focus on making sure there's a market, because if there is a market, a lot of investment and innovation follows.

[00:06:31] Ed Whittingham: So in the best case scenario, a 10 fold reduction would occur once manufacturing of components ramps up and an increasing number of intelligent people devote themselves to finding cost efficiencies. It's the same phenomena that led to a 10, 000 fold reduction in the cost of solar electricity from when it was first commercialized in the 1950s.

To the point where it is now the cheapest new build electricity in many places in the world.

Al Gore wasn't always a direct air capture skeptic. His interest in large scale carbon removal options originated from a spontaneous 2006 visit to the London home of Richard Branson, the high flying billionaire founder of the Virgin group of companies. Gore was in the UK to promote his hit documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

The encounter inspired Branson to seek out climate solutions, which led to setting up a competition called the Virgin Earth Challenge. 

[00:07:29] Newscast: Richard Branson is dangling a 25 million prize before the world, asking anybody to come up with a way to reduce greenhouse gases. 

[00:07:38] Reporter: With former Vice President Al Gore lending his support, British billionaire Richard Branson said he'll award 25 million to anyone who develops technology capable of removing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. 

[00:07:52] Ed Whittingham: The prize would be awarded by a high profile group of judges that included Al Gore himself. 

[00:07:57] Richard Branson: We decided to set up the Carbon War Room, which is working with the 21 industries that most pollute. There's no question that Virgin's involved, um, in.

You know, a number of businesses, uh, that emit a lot of carbon, uh, and that's one of the reasons that I have to work particularly hard and all the people at Virgin have to work particularly hard to balance our books, but more importantly, to, you know, try to help other people balance their books as well.

[00:08:23] Ed Whittingham: A pool of thousands of applicants was eventually whittled down to 11 finalists. Including five direct air capture proponents for several years, they worked diligently on fulfilling the requirements set out by the Virgin Earth Challenge, which included demonstrating that the proposed technology was viable based on future markets.

Then, in 2019, a year after the IPCC published a report stating that carbon removal would need to be scaled up massively to limit the average temperature rise to 1. 5 degrees Celsius. The Virgin Earth Challenge was terminated without awarding any prize money. Participants were informed that, quote, the market conditions necessary to support commercial and sustainable investment and the relevant carbon removal techniques We're not foreseeable.

Unquote. 

[00:09:14] Richard Branson: I'm a born optimist. I think it's much more fun in life to be an optimist. But we have to make our own optimism. If you're in a position to make a difference, you've got to spend every waking hour trying to make a difference.

[00:09:31] Ed Whittingham: Only four years after the Virgin Earth Challenge was terminated because a sufficient market wasn't foreseeable, Bloomberg estimated the market size for direct air capture alone would be worth over 1 trillion by 2037. Now that's from zero to a trillion in only four years, a truly incredible change, one that must have even surprised an optimist.

Like with most things in life, the future of DAC largely comes down to the question of cost. How much money will it take to remove carbon dioxide from the air? Occidental estimates CO2 and storing it underground from Stratos The project under construction in Texas will be cheaper than the cost of decarbonizing 5 billion tons per year from the hardest to decarbonize industries.

As deployment is ramped up and efficiencies are discovered through experience, Occidental believes the cost should eventually be closer to 100 per metric ton. At that level, the company estimates it would be less costly than about 15 billion tons per year of industrial emissions reductions. Klaus Lackner, the grandfather of direct air capture we heard from previously, has a philosophical view on costs, largely stemming from his background in academics and research.

[00:10:52] Klaus Lackner: Two things can happen by the time you are out of money. One is, you got the price down there, and that's enormously valuable for society because now you have a tool to actually solve the problem. Or you find out that for some obscure reason, this technology refuses to learn. Of course, you have a selection bias.

You only need to look at technologies which actually succeeded. So maybe the reason they didn't succeed is that they failed to learn. There's all sorts of things in why the costs come down. There is no guarantee in life that it works. But I think the odds that it will work are pretty good because I think it's as good as any other technology when it comes to this.

You learned something too, namely you learned you really have to get from plan B to plan C. Alternatively, you actually managed to solve the problem and it's now below 100 a ton and you can start putting regulations in place to actually solve the problem.

[00:11:52] Ed Whittingham: Regulations are certainly an important piece of the puzzle, but creating a regulatory environment that actually helps to push the cost curve downward can be a very delicate matter. Here's Sarah Hastings Simon. One of my co hosts on our Energy vs. Climate podcast. 

[00:12:06] Sara Hasting-Simon: There's all kinds of good reasons that, that we want to reduce the warming, um, that we have already locked in and, and not see it increase more, uh, in the future.

But we haven't, I would argue, really found a way to get people to pay for that at scale. And so all these great tools that we have to increase deployment and drive costs down, you know, we could, we could choose to do those and, you know, maybe we will when it comes to carbon direct removals. But we're still going to reach some future ends.

You know, point and date where companies are going to look around and say, well, it's gotten a lot cheaper, but who's going to keep paying for this? And, and I don't think that we've really have an answer to that yet. 

[00:12:42] Ed Whittingham: Energy versus climate's other co host, David Keith, who's also the founder of Carbon Engineering, the Canadian company we covered in episode two, is very pragmatic about how much of the public purse should be spent on further incentivizing the development of the carbon removal industry.

So 

[00:12:57] David Keith: if you asked me just as a voter, as a policy expert to say, How would I divide the total effort in, say, money right now between efforts to cut emissions and carbon removal? If I was voting, where would I put that dial? I'd say I'd spend, let's say, 95 percent on cutting emissions, and no more than 5 percent on carbon removal right now.

Because, from my perspective, You know, the first law of holes is when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. And the fundamental problem with climate is us putting the CO2 in the atmosphere. No question that job one is stopping putting it in the atmosphere. So you know, I'd say at most 5 percent of the total.

But the actual fraction of the total spend that we are now putting into carbon removal is quite a lot less than 5%. So if the world is spending about 1. 6 or more trillion dollars a year on clean energy broadly, which is about the right number, the Bloomberg number, I don't know a precise number of the amount it's spending on carbon removal, but my sense is it's a few billion dollars from what I talked about.

So that's actually down in the 1 percent or less range. This is partly kind of a, people don't understand what the numbers are. If you ask Americans Are we spending too much on foreign aid? Most of them say yes. If you ask them, should we spend 1 percent on foreign aid? A lot of people say yes, even though we actually spend much less than 1%.

So it's a kind of not knowing the number problem. If you asked climate advocates and experts in a kind of clean, random sample around the world, Should we spend 3 percent of the total budget dealing with net carbon emissions on the long term removals? I guess if people would say yeah, 3 percent sure. And if you asked a bunch of especially progressive activists Are we spending too much money on carbon removal?

They'd all say yes, even though we're spending less than 3 percent It's just people don't know the number 

[00:14:48] Ed Whittingham: Heirloom is one of the many new DAC companies sprouting up in the United States. I paid a visit to Heirloom's San Francisco Innovation Center in late 2024, where I met Christian Theuer, the company's head of policy and communications.

Hey Christian, good to see you again. 

[00:15:03] Christian Theuer: Ed, welcome back. 

[00:15:04] Ed Whittingham: Theuer argues that the public benefit is large enough to justify government incentives and investments. 

[00:15:10] Christian Theuer: Direct air capture is a first of a kind technology. This is a nascent industry. And if you want to scale up a technology like this on the runway we have left to make this a climate meaningful service, you're going to need to see governments step up to incentivize and encourage innovation and ensure that the first class of these facilities at, say, the megaton scale are successful.

And I think it's important to note here. The service of direct air capture and carbon removal generally is unique in that, as a buyer, if you're purchasing a ton of CO2 removal, you yourself aren't capturing all the benefit of that purchase. Everyone on earth benefits from there being a little less CO2 in the atmosphere with every ton that we remove.

In many ways it resembles a public good. Sort of like waste removal. This is essentially a waste removal service of carbon, excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And policy driven demand is going to be key to actually scaling this up to the meaningful volumes that the IPCC projects we're going to need to stop climate change.

The bipartisan infrastructure law established a direct air capture hubs program that, uh, Heirloom applied for and was successful. And applying for a megaton, a million ton removal hub in Louisiana, it's eligible for up to 600 million in federal funding. Um, places like the EU are thinking very seriously about this on the demand side, leveraging an emissions trading scheme to ingrain durable carbon dioxide removal, just meaning carbon removal that accounts for CO2 over the lifetime that would otherwise persist in the atmosphere.

Uh, Canada is, is approaching this from the supply side in terms of CapEx subsidies as well to attract direct air capture projects and places like Japan who have. Uh, also as an emissions trading scheme has recently actually in some respects taken the lead in making direct air capture as an eligible option to neutralize emissions that are covered under that scheme in Japan.

So you're seeing a lot of a race to scale these sorts of technologies globally. That's an excellent start. Is it sufficient to get to the. multi megaton scale. I think we need to continue to educate and work with policymakers about the realities of bringing a new industry to life like this.

[00:17:11] Ed Whittingham: This race to scale globally has investor Jim McDermott feeling bullish as you heard in our last episode. Jim's a real champion of DAC and he sure is not shy about it. 

[00:17:20] Jim McDermott: There are ways to make arguments in the United States based on regional differences? Like, for instance, the way you make an argument to someone in Texas about the environment is you talk about God's stewardship of the earth.

You know, if you pull that stunt in West LA, people are like, well, how about Mother Gaia? And like in New York, No one gives a shit about anything but money. If you tell them there's a ton of money to be made, they're on board. Like, let's do it. Let's save the environment.

Just when you thought the Americans really had their heads all the way up their asses. 

[00:17:57] Ed Whittingham: Not all Americans, Jim. Just one in Washington, D. C. 

[00:18:02] Trump: The windmills are driving the whales crazy. I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary. 

[00:18:11] Jim McDermott: Just when you thought the Americans really had their heads all the way up their asses.

It's going to come charging out the other side because Texas is going to win. CO2 extracted in Texas can be sold anywhere, to anyone. You have access to capital markets. The United States has the largest capital markets. And the low cost hubs are going to win, and Texas is going to be one of them. In fact, I think Texas might be the one of them.

You got a deep management pool, you got guys that know energy already, you got the infrastructure in place that other people are going to have to build, right? 

[00:18:45] Ed Whittingham: Jim's advice to other stable democracies like Canada is this. Run, don't walk, into the world of carbon removal. 

[00:18:53] Jim McDermott: Never underestimate the rule of law, the value of rule of law.

Like, okay, let's take Saudi. Saudi is another place that should work, right? It's very sunny. They got the infrastructure in place. They got lots of empty holes. But like, are you going to want to put like 20 billion into Saudi versus say Alberta? Like people are like, I'm, Canadians have rules. And when people are thinking about investing, right, particularly large sums of money, they go, well, you know, okay, infrastructure's there, regime's there.

Do I trust these people to like repay their debts? And if I write a contract with them, is it real? Is there a way to adjudicate things if it doesn't work? The problem in the United States is Fucking nobody agrees on anything ever. And I think if Canada can use the fact that it is, has all of the same assets, the subsurface stuff, transit opportunities in place, all that, and use the fact that they can be quicker, faster, and smarter because they're a relatively smaller country, to gain consensus around the regulatory stuff.

It's a huge opportunity. 

[00:19:57] Ed Whittingham: As Jim says, it should be easier to gain consensus in a country with a relatively small population like Canada. However, the recent track record on energy and climate policy has been anything but. One exception tends to be government procurement, which often has broader political support than, say, more controversial policies.

Like the consumer facing carbon tax and the oil and gas emissions limit. For example, Canada has recently committed to buying 10 million to carbon removal credits between now and 2030 to help reach its goal of net zero emissions in government operations by 2050. But as Sara Hastings Simon points out, That purchase ambition still has its limitations.

[00:20:37] Sara Hasting-Simon: We know that governments, when they have, uh, you know, kinds of procurement and innovation, they, they tend to like to procure things from within their own country boundaries. So, you know, I think that the, the idea that that might be the way that some of these are. set up in Canada, I think exactly, I would argue is really a reflection of exactly the way that we might see this market evolve and where in so much as we have public money that does go into buying this, you know, emissions reductions, it may really be hard to do that outside of the country boundaries.

[00:21:10] Ed Whittingham: At Carbon Removal Canada's Ottawa Carbon Removal Day in February 2025. There was a ton of excitement about developing carbon removal projects in Canada. And for good reasons. Canada has gigatons of storage space, technical know how, reservoir engineers, and increasingly supportive public policy. Moreover, this comes at a time when the US is pulling back its climate ambition and policy supports, a topic we cover over at Energy vs. Climate.

Developing a homegrown direct air capture industry is an opportunity that isn't lost on some Canadians with access to considerable resources. Éric St-Pierre is the Executive Director of the Trache Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization that recently announced a commitment of 150 million to combat the climate crisis.

[00:21:59] Éric St-Pierre: At some point, we also need to remove emissions. Um, nature based solutions are a very good solution, but maybe not, uh, enough to really get us there. So we need to look at other negative carbon removal options. Uh, so part of our portfolio has It's been focused on carbon removal. So we've, we've helped co fund or co establish the Carbon Removal Canada, uh, which is trying to work with policymakers, trying to work on our carbon removal targets.

Uh, but it's one piece of the puzzle and the puzzle is very complicated. We basically are putting our hedge on trying to decarbonize the sectors that we know we can really get to now. We know that there are solutions that We'll decarbonize the economy now, you know, heat pumps, they exist, how do we scale them?

Electric school buses, they exist, how do we scale them? Electric vehicles, you know, the car sales in Quebec and B. C. are quite high, but how do we increase that across Canada? So we've, we've got to be thinking holistically, uh, let's drastically reduce emissions, and then also start thinking about how to remove historical emissions.

[00:23:04] Ed Whittingham: These investments, whether by well heeled foundations or governments opening the public purse, will need to be accountable, which, according to David, shouldn't be that hard to do. 

[00:23:14] David Keith: The fundamental problem is trust. It's trust that it actually will work the way many scientists say it might work. And that's something I think capitalist competition does a really crappy job of.

I think capitalism is great and people compete. You don't have to trust what they say, you can measure it. So I think, to me, a big difference is. People don't have to rely on our claims. In the end, if these plants are built, it will be very easy for external parties to audit precisely how much CO2 is taken from the air.

That's an easy measurement to make. And in the end, it will be like public how much money is going in and it will just be a market thing. So other than checking there's no big environmental damages. People don't, well, they have to believe the claims and shouldn't believe the claims of lots of DAC startups about how things will work.

[00:24:00] Ed Whittingham: Skeptics may doubt the commercial viability of direct air capture and even the motivations of the people behind DAC. But for its believers, it signals the dawn of an industry that can actually help to reverse global warming. Earlier, we learned of the Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel, who demonstrated a new invention, the submarine, in the 1600s.

That technology was further developed for the next 100 years before a period of stagnation, and then picked up again in the 1800s. Unfortunately, our global climate crisis doesn't have the same luxury of time. As far as Jim is concerned, he's ready to put the pedal to the metal and move fast.

[00:24:44] Jim McDermott: I do it on a probabilistic basis, which is I put it a kind of like a 0. 95 probability that if we don't go fast enough, the environmental degradation or the severity of the environmental downside is going to be very high versus. If we go really fast, maybe there's a small percentage, maybe even a medium percentage that it's a bad outcome, but when faced with those two choices, the answer is go as fast as you can.

I always tell my kids too, I'm like, you know, I know you guys are freaked out and I know it looks bad, but keep in mind that wherever things are the most dangerous, the most returns go to the people who fix them. We're going to have to deal with all this and it's going to, you know, it's going to require some very fundamental restructuring and a lot of innovation and a lot of finance and a lot, all the things that make economies grow that produce wealth and well being.

So I think it's going to be great. It's going to be hard, but there's nothing that's good that's easy. 

[00:25:43] Ed Whittingham: So here we are, skeptics like Al Gore. who doubt both DAC and the motives behind its believers, and champions like Jim McDermott, who think it's going to be great. Of course, people also doubted, or continued to doubt, electric cars, renewable energy, and these days, AI.

Pursuing decarbonization and big tech ideas will undoubtedly make some uncomfortable. As I mentioned earlier, as of 2025, all climate action is facing political headwinds blowing hard from the Trump administration. We'll need DAC's champions and other governments To double down on the resolve for carbon removal.

If we're going to successfully cool the planet in these critical decades to come. The race is on. And it's one we can't afford to lose.

That's it for Season 1 of Scrubbing the Sky. Thanks for listening. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your platform of choice. I'm Ed Whittingham. This podcast series is produced by Amit Tandon and Bespoke Podcasts, with help from Pat Kelly, Lauren Bercovitch, and Chris Kelly of Kelly&Kelly.. I want to give a very special shout out to my friend and Scrubbing the Sky author, Paul McKendrick. Without Paul and his suggestion years ago, this podcast would simply not exist. Thanks, Paul. This series is made possible through the generous support of the Conscon Foundation, the Trottier Foundation, the Grantham Foundation, Linden Trust and Spitfire, and the Auxilium Foundation.

For more information about the book this series is based on, please visit www. scrubbingthesky. com