Who Pays for Carbon Removal? A Key Question from Climate Week Northwest
By Brad Warren and Laura Gibson
Francesca Hillery (left), GOH's Director of Partnerships, moderates a panel during mCDR Day at PNW Climate Week with panelists Wil Burns, Nathan Soccorsy and Meghan Gavin. Photo: Danny Gawlowski, Carbon to Sea.
On July 15, Global Ocean Health CEO Brad Warren and Director of Partnerships Francesca Hillery participated in Oceans as Climate Heroes: mCDR Day, a full-day PNW Climate Week event exploring marine carbon dioxide removal science, policy, finance, governance, and justice. Francesca moderated the final panel of the day—“Finance, Governance, and Indigenous Participation in mCDR.”
One of the panel’s most important exchanges came near the end, when participants addressed a question the carbon removal field cannot afford to avoid: Who will pay for it?
The most expensive way to deal with pollution is to wait until you’ve made a big, dangerous mess and then call 911. Naturally, that’s the path our modern world has chosen. As the IPCC has been telling us for a decade, we humans must tighten the spigot on new pollution, and we must also work out how to pay for cleanup of a dangerous backlog of carbon emissions that is wreaking havoc on fisheries, farms, water supplies, and just about anything that can catch fire (around the world, wildfires burned more than 402 million acres in the first five months of 2026).
Mike Robinson, organizer of the day-long session on marine carbon removal, laid out a simple fact that is too often ignored: this is a waste-management problem. A leader in the Pacific Coast Legacy Emissions Action Network (PacCLEAN.org), Robinson predicted that the world will (the sooner the better) handle its waste stream of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases the same way we manage our garbage and sewage: We create utilities to haul away our wastes and either process them for benign re-use or (one hopes) safely contain them. Robinson and Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, outlined efforts to develop the kind of policy that underpins these ubiquitous utility services. It’s called a monthly bill. The bill is backed up by laws that make everyone responsible to pay the tab for their own wastes.
In carbon removal, one version of this common-sense principle is a concept called a "carbon take-back obligation” (CTB). This would require fossil-carbon producers and importers to pay for the permanent removal and storage of the carbon released by their products from its ancient storage vault under the ground. Companies would either do the waste management work or hire it out. The cost would pass down to fuel consumers in the price of fuel, holding each of us responsible for our own GHG garbage disposal.
The CTBO is not a perfect or complete solution. But it might be one part of a comprehensive approach with other components. By itself, a CTBO would only cover the cleanup cost for emissions as they occur. It does not pay for cleaning up the trillions of tons of emissions already gushed into the air, which bring us waves of fire, drought, flood, crop failure, fishery collapse, and other woes each year.
Without a durable mechanism to pay for carbon removal, the world’s toolkit for cleanup will never grow big enough for the job at hand. The CTBO may be incomplete, but it is a welcome start on the road to the kind of future that generations of our descendants have a right to expect. We were glad to see this difficult but essential question addressed directly—and to see PNW Climate Week create space for a substantive conversation about what it will take for marine CDR to have a viable and sustainable future.
