Full Title: U.S. Congressional Action Needed to Accelerate Ocean-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal Solutions
Author(s): Carbon to Sea Initiative
Publisher(s): Carbon to Sea Initiative
Publication Date: March 16, 2024
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Covering more than 70 percent of the planet and holding about 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, our ocean plays a big role in helping to stabilize our climate. But this natural process comes at a cost. Too much greenhouse gas pollution in the air, blunted by the ocean, has cascading effects, making the ocean more acidic, increasingly starved of oxygen, less productive, and less habitable for fish and marine wildlife. Today’s climate challenges require urgent solutions.
To this end, scientists around the world are evaluating whether and which ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (oCDR) approaches can safely and permanently reduce atmospheric CO₂. While philanthropy is bringing important resources to this effort, the government also has a critical role to play. Across technology sectors, such as medicine, renewable energy, or climate mitigation, government funding has long provided vital support for early innovation, advancement toward commercial viability, and development of the knowledge needed to ensure technologies are safe, effective, and properly regulated.
The federal government is already spending billions to advance the technological readiness of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) necessary for commercial deployment yet has invested only modestly in developing the ocean-based forms of these technologies. As the critical role our ocean plays in stabilizing the climate becomes more widely understood alongside the growing recognition that CDR must play a big role in meeting our climate goals, the U.S. must right size investments in oCDR.