Authored by Wil Burns, Co-Director, Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy, American University
The Democratic party’s draft policy platform, drafted by the Democratic National Committees platform drafting committee, was released this week. The platform will be considered by the delegates to the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee convention next month, where the delegates will make final decisions on the text of the non-binding policy document.
The draft’s climate section contains a number of provisions pertinent to carbon dioxide/negative emissions approaches, including the following:
- In seeking to develop a “thriving, equitable, and globally competitive clean energy economy,” the United States should seek to “develop and manufacture next-generation technologies to address the climate crisis …” [p.44]. These technologies include “direct air capture and net-negative emissions technologies,” as well as “carbon capture and sequestration that permanently stores greenhouse gases …” [p. 48). The platform also calls for support for “the most historically far-reaching public investments and private sector incentives for research, development, demonstration, and employment of net-generation technologies …” [p. 48];
- In pursuit of the objective of eliminating power plant carbon pollution by 2035 to “reach net-zero emissions as rapidly as possible [and no later than by 2050],” decarbonization strategies should include carbon capture and storage [p. 45];
- In the context of the agricultural sector, the platform calls for a partnership to help farmers develop new sources of income including through, inter alia, lower-emission, and regenerative agricultural practices.” [p.47] While the contours of these practices are not outlined in the document, one would presume that it would include methods to rebuild soil organic matter, such as no-till agriculture and cover crops;
- There are also several provisions related to public lands stewardship that, albeit vague, might help facilitate enhanced carbon sequestration. The platform calls for the development of a youth corps to conserve public lands. [p. 45] Moreover, it advocates full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund to ensure the conservation of public lands, as well as programs to incentivize conservation initiatives on private lands, “including through private sector ecosystems markets.” [pp.48-9];
- There is only one reference to the potential role of afforestation/reforestation in climate policy, with a focus on temperature impacts, with the platform calling for the planting of “millions of trees” in urban areas to “help reduce heat stress.” [p. 47]
The drafters’ engagement in the potential role of CDR/NETs approaches in climate policymaking is laudable, and reflects a potentially expanded role for such options compared to that contemplated in the New Green Deal, which briefly discussed tree-planting as a carbon sequestration strategy. At the same time, the draft platform is also an extremely underdeveloped set of proposals in terms of fleshing out potentially requisite levels of funding, necessary regulatory frameworks to facilitate research, development, and potential deployment of many of these options, and the daunting issue of how to integrate such approaches into the current climate policymaking domain at the state, national and international level. It is also notable that one of the most widely discussed potential carbon dioxide removal approaches, afforestation/reforestation, is given extremely short shrift in the document, with the only reference to tree planting focused on albedo effects rather than carbon sequestration potential. While the delegates will have the opportunity to hone the document, it’s unclear if they will have the expertise to address some of these concerns.
However, in the end, perhaps it’s helpful in itself to have a major party acknowledge the potentially important role of CDR/NETs options in pursuing the critical objective of net emissions neutrality in the next few decades. The platform establishes a foundation for the hard work that would inevitably need to follow to make this a reality.