Public Perceptions of Carbon Dioxide Removal in Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, and Colorado
By Grace Adcox and Catherine Fraser
The world witnessed the hottest year on record in at least 150 years in 2023. Scientists globally agree that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies are necessary to address global warming and limit its destabilizing environmental and societal impacts. With the passage of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Congress made an unprecedented investment in a suite of CDR technologies, including $3.5 billion to create four direct air capture (DAC) hubs across the country. The Department of Energy (DOE) awarded its initial funding announcements for its DAC hubs in August 2023, setting the stage for historic investment and scale-up of DAC in the U.S. Although the IIJA and IRA made record investments in CDR, experts still say we’re behind on developing these technologies and practices.
CDR is a strategy by which carbon dioxide (CO2) is removed directly from the air using nature-based solutions, technological strategies, or a combination of the two. Technological examples of CDR can take many forms — including DAC, biomass carbon removal and storage, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and more. DAC uses a system of filters to draw down CO2 emissions from the ambient air and is especially useful in sectors where point-source capture is not possible — like agriculture or transportation. The deployment of CDR is intended to remove past emissions of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well as to address the emissions associated with industries that are difficult to decarbonize, ultimately seeking to achieve net negative emissions of carbon dioxide.
Despite being often conflated, this suite of technologies does not include similarly named carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies. CCUS technologies aim to capture carbon dioxide emissions at a point source, like a smokestack, rather than seeking to address past emissions.
Importantly, CDR and DAC technologies are no substitute for ambitious measures to cut emissions and phase out fossil fuels. Successful DAC development and deployment must consider the diverse contexts, needs, and opportunities for DAC across localities. Given legacies of discriminatory siting practices, disinvestment in communities of color, and environmental injustice, along with the imperative to center equity in the buildout of DAC, the National Wildlife Federation and Data for Progress surveyed likely voters in four states — Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, and Colorado — being considered for CDR deployment to understand voter attitudes toward CDR and DAC.
From 2022 to 2023, Data for Progress and the National Wildlife Federation conducted surveys of likely voters in each state, weighting the surveys to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, geography, and voting history. For more detailed information, see the Methodology section within the Appendix of this report.