Tag: legal issues

Peer-reviewed Publications

Cabus (2025): Navigating Uncertainty: Legal Considerations for Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal as a Climate Solution

Tony Cabus, IN: Springer Nature, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-85217-6_7

While mCDR can be deployed unilaterally, its maximum efficiency requires international coordination due to potentially extensive transboundary effects. However, the current international legal framework, including the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement lack a dedicated regime for mCDR, resulting in the application of ill-suited regulations. In this context, principles of international law, which could provide guidance on the permissibility of mCDR, instead add to the confusion. This chapter addresses the unrealistic expectation of current legal frameworks to overly rely on unequivocal instructions from natural sciences to eliminate the risks, and provides two avenues to contend with risks. One comes to encouraging the use of best science through transparency and standardisation. The other circumvents risks by restraining overuse of mCDR while improving liability mechanisms. Contrary to the prevailing notion of the law’s impotency in the face of scientific uncertainty, it seeks to oppose this scepticism by offering legal remedies that, if not eliminating the risk entirely, aim to mitigate and frame it effectively.

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Books

Book: Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal for Climate Mitigation-The Legal Framework

Edited by Romany M. Webb, Korey Silverman-Roati, Michael B. Gerrard; April 2023, 344 pp, Edward Elgar Publishing, ISBN: 978 1 80220 884 9

Examining the existing legal framework for ocean carbon dioxide removal (CDR), this book highlights potential legal challenges and opportunities associated with using the ocean to remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It describes five commonly discussed ocean CDR techniques, including rock-based ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), electrochemical OAE, ocean fertilization, artificial upwelling and downwelling, and seaweed cultivation, and explores the legal issues that different techniques could raise. This book explores the laws governing ocean CDR research and deployment at the international level and domestically in seven countries across Asia, Europe, and North America. The analysis highlights the complexities and uncertainties associated with applying existing international and domestic law to ocean CDR, providing lawyers and policymakers with invaluable insights into areas where legal reforms are needed to facilitate in-ocean research and deployment.

Contributors include: Catherine Banet, Kevin P. Berk, Michael B. Gerrard, Medes Malaihollo, Panos Merkouris, Frans Nelissen, Alexander Proelss, Catherine Redgwell, Sara Seck, Korey Silverman-Roati, Robert C. Steenkamp, David L. VanderZwaag, Romany M. Webb, Lei Zhang, Keyuan Zou

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Science-Policy Documents

Webb et al. (2022): Removing Carbon Dioxide Through Artificial Upwelling and Downwelling: Legal Challenges and Opportunities

Romany M. Webb, Korey Silverman-Roati, Michael Gerrard IN: Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, May 2022 (Columbia Law School’s Scholarship Archive)

Uncertainty regarding the laws governing artificial upwelling and downwelling has been identified as a potential barrier to research and deployment. This paper helps to fill existing knowledge gaps by analyzing the application of international and domestic (U.S.) law to artificial upwelling and downwelling.

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Podcasts

Podcast: Carbon Removal Newsroom: Geoengineering vs. carbon removal, and California’s Cement Decarbonization legislation

“This week on Carbon Removal Newsroom[gt], we’re back with a policy-focused episode with panelists Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition and host Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori. First up, we’re discussing an essay from Harvard professor David Keith in the New York Times titled, “What’s the Least Bad Way to Cool the Planet?” Keith compares Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and geoengineering, pointing out that the two approaches operate on different timescales— CDR will take decades to build up, and longer still to have a significant impact due to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Solar Radiation Management, a type of geoengineering, could be done with today’s technology and theoretically has an immediate cooling effect. There is a lot we don’t know but his ‘hunch’ is that geoengineering would work more quickly, be cheaper, and benefit the world’s hotter regions more immediately. He calls for governments to fund more research into the topic so the two techniques can be more accurately compared. We debate David Keith’s main points and Holly Buck describes the socio-technical systems that might be necessary to deploy geoengineering and larger-scale CDR most effectively. Next, we’re looking at the Cement Decarbonization legislation passed in California that mandates the state’s cement industry to become net-zero by 2045. According to the Climateworks Foundation’s Rebecca Dell, this is the first time any US state has required an industry to eliminate its net greenhouse gas emissions. Cement production is the second-largest emitter of any industry in California, after only oil and gas production, and it also contributes to significant local air pollution. While the greenhouse gas mitigation from this move is notable, this law also has the potential to provide needed policy support to the carbon removal and carbon utilization industries. We discuss the types of incentives that might be most successful in moving the needle on hard to abate emissions, then end the episode with a good news story of the week from Chris— Japan is restarting several aging nuclear reactors in an attempt to meet its carbon emissions goals.”

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Video

Video: Can we remove carbon from the atmosphere? (True Planet)

“There is no ‘magic’ technology to solve climate change, says Professor Cameron Hepburn, Director and Professor of Environmental Economics at Oxford’s Smith School and director of the university’s Economics of Sustainability programme. ‘I wish there were,’ he says. ‘But we have to use all the existing tricks we have in the book as fast as possible to reduce emissions.’ Professor Hepburn emphasises there are some really interesting new technologies – and he thinks we should work to scale these up. In the meantime, he says, we already have some very old technology – the humble tree, which has been doing an important job for millennia – and is making a real contribution to reducing climate change. But Professor Hepburn says that right now, far from rewilding and restoring our ecosystems, we are deforesting and damaging nature with harmful agricultural practices. That needs to change. ‘Used together these various techniques…are going to make quite a big contribution to addressing climate change…what’s stopping us?’ Part of the problem, he says, is that somebody has to pay – and we need to talk about how to achieve that, without relying entirely on the taxpayer. But economics is only part of this, he says. We also need to think about a range of complex issues from politics to equity and beliefs – but, critically, the public needs to be on-board.”

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Science-Policy Documents

Romany M. Webb, et al. (2021): Removing Carbon Dioxide Through Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement and Seaweed Cultivation. Legal Challenges and Opportunities. Columbia Law School: Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law

Romany M. Webb, Korey Silverman-Roati (2021): Removing Carbon Dioxide Through Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement and Seaweed Cultivation. Legal Challenges and Opportunities. Columbia Law School: Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law. New York. Available online at https://climate.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/Webb%20et%20al%20-%20Removing%20CO2%20Through%20Ocean%20Alkalinity%20Enhancement%.

“This paper explores two ocean-based carbon dioxide removal strategies—ocean alkalinity enhancement and seaweed cultivation. Ocean alkalinity enhancement involves adding alkalinity to ocean waters, either by discharging alkaline rocks or through an electrochemical process, which increases ocean pH levels and thereby enables greater uptake of carbon dioxide, as well as reducing the adverse impacts of ocean acidification. Seaweed cultivation involves the growing of kelp and other macroalgae to store carbon in biomass, which can then either be used to replace more greenhouse gas-intensive products or sequestered. This paper examines the international and U.S. legal frameworks that apply to ocean alkalinity enhancement and seaweed cultivation. Depending on where they occur, such activities may be subject to international, national, state, and/or local jurisdiction.”

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Corbett, Charles (2020): Chemtrails and Solar Geoengineers: Governing Online Conspiracy Theory Misinformation

Corbett, Charles (2020): Chemtrails and Solar Geoengineers: Governing Online Conspiracy Theory Misinformation. In Missouri Law Review 85 (3). Available online at https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol85/iss3/5.

“This Article assesses legal obstacles to regulating chemtrail misinformation and proposes responses that work within prevailing norms and laws governing online speech.”

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Wilson, Brooke (2021): Past the Tipping Point, but With Hope of Return: How Creating a Geoengineering Compulsory Licensing Scheme Can Incentivize Innovation

Wilson, Brooke (2021): Past the Tipping Point, but With Hope of Return: How Creating a Geoengineering Compulsory Licensing Scheme Can Incentivize Innovation. In Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice 27 (2), p. 791. Available online at https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol27/iss2/13.

“This Note explores the patenting of geoengineering technologies and issues arising from the early stages of this high-risk, high-reward technology. This Note focuses on one possible solution to solving the issues surrounding the patenting of geoengineering technology: Creating a specialized compulsory licensing scheme.”

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