EU’s proposed carbon removal rules open to greenwashing, say experts
EU plans to certify removals of carbon from the atmosphere are at risk of allowing greenwashing and fall short of what is needed to curb emissions to limit global warming, say climate change experts.
Under the latest draft of the proposal, operators of carbon removal schemes will be able to register carbon that is taken and stored deep in underground rock formations.
It would also allow for the carbon stored in land areas such as forests and soils and in “long-lasting products” — these are not yet defined but could include wooden buildings as “stores”, for example.
But the EU regulation sets up the workings of a certification system without presenting any detail on what will count as a permanent carbon removal and for how long the carbon must be stored in order to be counted, environmental experts say.
“It’s a framework, it’s very vague, it’s very non-committal, we are lacking a lot of very crucial wording,” said Wijnand Stoefs, policy officer at the non-governmental organisation Carbon Market Watch, which is an accredited observer at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Carbon capture and storage, the process of capturing carbon before it goes into the atmosphere, would be counted as a “permanent removal” under the EU proposal. However, CCS does not meet the EU’s criteria for carbon removal, which defines it as carbon taken out of the atmosphere and not just capturing new emissions.
In an open letter published on Monday, a group of eight environmental organisations said the EU was wrong to give prominence to technologies such as carbon capture and storage, which were “not currently viable at scale and have potentially enormous social, environmental, and economic risks and costs from their very high energy and resource consumption as well as from the transport and storage of carbon dioxide”.
The question of removing carbon from the atmosphere has risen in prominence as it becomes more apparent that the world is unlikely to be able to keep the rise in temperatures to the “well below 2C” level, and ideally 1.5C, set out in the Paris climate agreement.
Temperatures have already risen at least 1.1C, and emissions have continued to increase globally despite efforts in developed nations to cut reliance on fossil fuels and develop cleaner energy sources.
The EU has set out its ambition to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 through a series of laws under its umbrella “Green Deal” legislation. In 2021, it set interim targets of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels.
Nascent carbon offsets markets already allow companies to buy against projects that claim to have reduced or absorbed emissions, such as growing trees or ocean conservation. Scientists and climate experts judge these as flawed as they are hard to monitor and distract businesses and governments from making an effort to cut the original sources of emissions.
The EU’s carbon removal certification framework would be the first government effort to set a standard for such initiatives.
The area is highly complex to regulate, as accounting methods must ensure that the carbon removed is additional and verified, and that it is kept in a store permanently.
Relying on forests to store carbon, for example, can be problematic if there are widespread forest fires, as there were across Europe and North America, turning the trees into a source of carbon emissions instead.
Earlier this month, a coalition of seven environmental organisations including the European Environmental Bureau and the WWF sent a letter to the European Commission warning that “differentiation between permanent and short-term storage is critical, and short or medium-term ‘stores’ of carbon (such as bio-based building materials, plastics or textiles, typically only usable for up to a few decades at most) should not be equated with permanent storage in any way”.
The EU document said that “permanent storage” should include schemes that remove carbon and store it for “several centuries”. Carbon storage products should be “long-lasting”, it said.
The commission had also been expected this week to publish a directive on green claims, designed to force companies marketing certain products as “green” to substantiate their advertising, but has had to delay its announcement, according to three people involved, because of the complexity of defining and enforcing such a system. The commission declined to comment.
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