Author: CRT Admin

The November 20 issue of The Economist has two articles gushing about the good that can be accomplished by removing CO2 from our atmosphere.

For several years now, I have been advocating carbon capture as the way to minimize global warming.  It seems sometimes as the effort has been no more than a small voice crying in the human wilderness of experts and doomsayers.

My thinking, I hope, has been informed by the Caux Round Table approach to problems – what we have done to ourselves, we can undo with application of our inventive genius and our moral sense.  Thus, if the technology of industrialization put too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, different, newly invented technology can take it back out.

A fixation on successful carbon capture and removal for reuse or sequestering would be a most constructive outcome of the COP28 meeting in Dubai.

Since producing too much CO2 creates a public “bad” – a non-rivalrous negative dynamic threatening all of humanity – its removal from the atmosphere would be a public “good.”  In conventional thinking about how to create public goods for all of us to enjoy simultaneously, we have long looked to the production of such goods by public utilities.  So, why not have governments fund and operate carbon removal facilities as public utilities, charging society for the costs of improving our lives in common?

Opening up such a possibility, The Economist said:

Few of those who have mouthed commitments to net zero appreciate how central greenhouse-gas removal is to the notion; of those who do, few recognise quite how vast the challenge is.  Emission cuts of 90% would still see enough gas entering the atmosphere for a balancing level of removals to be a huge undertaking.

Studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest that if the planet is to stand a decent chance of staying below the 2°C limit on warming, it would be wise to plan on removing an additional 5bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year.

.. humankind’s transfer of fossil-fuel carbon from its quiet rest in the solid Earth to the hurly-burly of the atmosphere.  Roughly 1trn tons of carbon dioxide have accumulated there thanks to human activity.  The total is growing by a bit less than 20bn tons a year.

… the rate at which the world’s biosphere photosynthesises is almost exactly the rate at which life’s other processes return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  With carbon dioxide from fossil fuels added to the natural emissions, photosynthesis has valiantly tried to keep up, sucking back down as much as it can.  But it cannot do enough.  It only absorbs about a third of the emissions from human industry and agriculture.

In Notrees, in a remote corner of the Texas oil patch, 1PointFive, an arm of Occidental Petroleum, an American oil firm and of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian startup backed by Bill Gates has built the world’s first commercial-scale “direct air capture” (dac) plant.

Like a tree, dac sucks carbon dioxide from the air, concentrates it and makes it available for some use.  In the natural case, that use is creating organic molecules through photosynthesis. For dac, it can be things for which humans already use CO₂, like adding fizz to drinks, spurring plant growth in greenhouses or, in Occidental’s case, injecting it into oilfields to squeeze more drops of crude from the deposits.

Yet, some of the 500,000 tonnes of CO₂ that the Notrees plant will capture annually, once fully operational in 2025, will be pumped beneath the plains.

Carbon Engineering and its rivals, like Climeworks, a Swiss firm, Global Thermostat, a Californian one and myriad startups worldwide, are attracting capital.  Occidental plans to build 100 large-scale dac facilities by 2035.  Others are trying to mop up CO₂ produced by power plants and industrial processes before it enters the atmosphere, an approach known as carbon capture and storage.  In April, ExxonMobil unveiled plans for its newish low-carbon division, whose long-term goal is to offer such decarbonisation as a service for industrial customers in sectors like steel and cement, where emissions are otherwise hard to abate.  The oil giant thinks this sector could be raking in annual revenues of $6trn globally by 2050.

Svante, a Canadian startup, uses inexpensive materials to capture CO₂ from dirty industrial flue gas for around $50 a tonne (though that excludes transport and storage).  Other companies are converting the captured carbon into products which they then hope to sell at a profit.  CarbonFree, which works with U.S. Steel and BP, a British oil-and-gas company, takes CO₂ from industrial processes and turns it into speciality chemicals.  LanzaTech, which has a commercial-scale partnership with ArcelorMittal, a European steel giant and several Chinese industrial firms, builds bioreactors that convert industrial carbon emissions into useful materials.  Some make their way into portable carbon stores, such as Lululemon yoga pants.

One obvious way to promote the industry would be to make carbon polluters pay a high enough fee for every tonne of carbon they emit that it would be in their interest to pay carbon removers to mop it all up, either at the source or from the atmosphere.

Buyers of carbon credits are starting to line up.  Tech firms, keen to burnish their progressive credentials, are leading the way.  On May 15, Microsoft said it would purchase (for an undisclosed sum) 2.7m tons of carbon captured over a decade from biomass-burning power plants run by Orsted, a Danish clean-energy firm and pumped underneath the North Sea by a consortium involving Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, three European oil giants.  On May 18, Frontier, a buyers’ club with a $1bn carbon-removal pot bankrolled mainly by Alphabet, Meta, Stripe and Shopify, announced a $53m deal with Charm Industrial.  The firm will remove 112,000 tons of CO₂ between 2024 and 2030 by converting agricultural waste, which would otherwise emit carbon as it decomposes, into an oil that can be stored underground.

Big tech is not alone.  NextGen, a joint venture between Mitsubishi Corporation, a Japanese conglomerate and South Pole, a Swiss developer of carbon-removal projects, intends to acquire over 1m tons in certified CO₂-removal credits by 2025 and sell them on to others.  It has just announced the purchase of nearly 200,000 tons’ worth of such credits from 1PointFive and two other ventures.  The end-buyers include SwissRe and UBS, two Swiss financial giants, Mitsuoki Lines, a Japanese shipping firm and Boston Consulting Group.  On May 23, JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, said it would spend over $200m in the coming years on buying credits from carbon-removal firms.

Also in recent days, taking advantage of the attention focused on COP28, the consulting firm McKinsey published a report on the status of carbon capture, which you can find here.

According to McKinsey, a CDR industry capable of delivering gigaton-scale removals at net-zero levels could be worth up to $1.2 trillion by 2050.  This industry would require input and support from a range of players, including investors, suppliers, buyers, traders and other intermediaries, with substantial potential value pools estimated for each.

As you may know, a few months ago, I published a book on how Henry Kissinger, in early 1971, personally decided to abandon the South Vietnamese nationalists to “fate.”

For me, that decision of his, which was compounded in infamy by the abandonment of the Cambodians to the Khmer Rouge and the Lao and the Hmong to oppressive subjugation, should define his flawed use of power as a substitute for morality, as we assess, in retrospect, his contributions to global affairs.

As I noted in my book, he gave new efficacy to the ancient Athenian boast that “The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.”

If you want to know the facts and “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” on his sabotage of Vietnamese nationalist aspirations, please consider reading my book, Kissinger’s Betrayal: How America Lost the Vietnam War.

You may buy the book or audio version here.

Additional information can be found here.

I would like to share with you a recommendation of mine to boards of directors which has just been published by Directors&Boards in the U.S.  I attempt to fit the Caux Round Table’s advocacy of the importance of intangible capitals – social and human, in particular – to successful and lasting wealth creation by capitalism firms into board of directors best practices.

You may read my argument, published today, on how to improve valuation of company wealth creation here.

We recently posted more short videos on relevant and timely topics.  They include:

–On Time Magazine’s Best Companies List

–The Value of Intangibles

–Could the Covenants Help in Gaza?

–Investment, Markets and ESG

All our videos can be found on our YouTube page here.  We recently put them into 9 playlists, which you can find here.

If you aren’t following us on Twitter or haven’t liked us on Facebook, please do so.  We update both platforms frequently.

I want to share with you this letter, which I received last Friday, November 17, from Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State at the Vatican.  I am grateful for his affirmation of our work.

It is your participation in the work of the Caux Round Table which justifies the Cardinal’s remarks about our including the different thoughts and perspectives of so many in seeking the common good.

Under the radar, the Caux Round Table has worked to find and advocate a better way of thinking about our politics than culture war.

To build a more moral capitalism, we must first determine what conditions are necessary to support such a system.  A fundamental requirement is compatible politics and government.

No moral capitalism can emerge where there is corruption, abuse of law, rent-seeking everywhere you turn, concentration of power and wealth in elites – social, aristocratic, military, one-party authoritarianism.

Bad government for decades has prevented peoples from obtaining the personal and societal benefits of economic development.  Bad government chokes the formation of good social capital and causes human capital to stagnate.

To counter the baleful influences of bad government, the Caux Round Table proposed ethical principles for moral government.

They might even improve our prospects for domestic tranquility here in the U.S.

We need your financial support to better advocate these simple principles for moral government.  I hope you can make a contribution to our work.

You can donate on our Give to the Max page or directly through PayPal found on our homepage here (click yellow “donate” button).

If you rather mail a check, our mailing address is 75 West Fifth Street, Suite 219, St. Paul, MN 55102.

Thank you for your support.