Expensive but effective: Why citizens support costly but durable carbon removal practices

As climate change accelerates and emission reduction efforts struggle to reach the Paris Agreement’s goal to reduce global warming to well below 2°C until 2050, carbon removal has become critical for mitigating CO₂ emissions that are hard to abate otherwise. In Switzerland, these hard-to-abate emissions mostly originate from the agricultural sector, cement, and (bio)waste-to-energy plants. Carbon removal often involves extracting CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it in plants, soil, or even deep rock formations. Well-known approaches to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere include afforestation projects or machines that filter CO₂ directly from the air (i.e., Direct Air Capture and Storage). However, capturing CO₂ from the fumes of bioenergy plants, that burn organic material like wood chips or biowaste, can also lead to negative CO₂ emissions since plants absorb CO₂ as they grow but release it once they are burned  (i.e., Bioenergy with Carbon, Capture and Storage).

While policymakers and scientists alike consider carbon removal necessary for successful climate change mitigation, the effectiveness of this mitigation approach hinges on well-executed regulations that ensure that removed CO₂ remains stored as long as necessary. The reason for this is that as soon as captured & stored CO₂ leaks back into the atmosphere, it continues to contribute to climate change, reversing the positive effect carbon removal had on the climate. Recent scrutiny of afforestation projects has highlighted the need for better regulation that targets carbon removal practices especially as more countries rely on it to reach their climate change mitigation goals. Currently, many projects that claim to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere fail to deliver meaningful climate benefits due to inadequate storage time or failure to remove CO₂ to begin with. In response, European countries started to propose certification standards for carbon removal to ensure that only durable projects are certified. While higher standards are expected to raise the effectiveness of carbon removal, they will likely also raise the costs for businesses and consumers as they restrict access to cheap and ineffective carbon removal certificates.

Public Support Challenges Associated with Carbon Removal Regulations

Public opinion can make or break the implementation of climate policy. In Switzerland, with its strong direct-democratic instruments, recent examples include the rejection of the CO₂ Act in the 2021 referendum and the adoption of the Climate and Innovation Act. As public awareness of carbon removal increases, this means that public support for carbon removal regulations is essential to ensure that they contribute to climate change mitigation.

Carbon removal certification standards increase the costs and the effectiveness of carbon removal practices. While higher policy costs generally decrease public support, perceived effectiveness has the opposite effect. The negative effect of high costs on public support is particularly pronounced for climate policy, given that climate change mitigation mostly aims at achieving targets in the distant future. This means that the costs of climate policy hit immediately, while its goals and societal benefits are more distant, abstract and uncertain. This is also true for the deployment of carbon removal, which aims to contribute to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions between 2040 and 2050.

However, the widespread belief that citizens are unwilling to pay for climate change mitigation neglects the fact that citizens also demand effective climate policies.  Thus, it is not clear if citizens will always choose cheaper climate policy options over more expensive ones. For example, although the rejection of the Swiss CO₂ law is often attributed to the fact that it would have raised the costs of climate-damaging behavior, a less frequently cited reason is that the Swiss public also questioned its effectiveness. Thus, when forming our climate policy preferences, we might not always prioritize immediate policy costs. On the contrary, if we are convinced that a policy will be effective in mitigating climate change in the long term, we are much more likely to believe that the policy will be beneficial, especially as climate change becomes more visible today. Regulations that increase the effectiveness of carbon removal could potentially counteract the negative effect of its rising prices resulting from these measures on public support. This includes regulations that prevent the use of carbon removal methods that are unable to store CO₂ over longer times or testing policy measures with pilot phases before settling for final implementation.

Citizens Prefer Costly Durable Carbon Removal Over Cheap Temporary Ones

My co-author Thomas Bernauer and I conducted a public opinion survey (about 3000 participants) to test whether regulations that increase the perceived effectiveness of carbon removal can increase support for it, even if they increase costs. Our survey was fielded in Switzerland and the UK between March and April 2023. Survey participants had to complete a choice experiment embedded in the survey. In this experiment, participants were presented with five randomly generated pairs of carbon removal policies (see Figure 1 for an example of the profile presented to respondents). The policy instruments included the acceptable minimum lifetime of carbon removals eligible for carbon credits (i.e. between 1 and 500 years), the associated uncertainty (i.e. 5 to 20 percent), the inclusion of pilot phases (none to 10 years), connected increases in airline ticket prices (i.e. CHF/GBP 30 to 190), and government subsidies (i.e. none to 75 percent).