Joe Biden, within his aggressive climate plans, aims to keep power plant and industrial workers at their jobs by backing technologies that capture carbon emissions from smokestacks and store it underground.
The focus on carbon capture has helped him win buy-in from some fossil fuel-heavy labor unions. Yet it risks a fight with left-wing environmentalists and liberal Democratic lawmakers who see carbon capture as an excuse to perpetuate fossil fuels.
“We think [carbon capture and storage] represents magical thinking that is basically a lifeline to a dying industry,” said Karen Orenstein, climate and energy director at Friends of the Earth. “What we need to be doing immediately is a managed decline in fossil fuels and a rapid, just transition to 100% renewable energy.”
For Biden, though, carbon capture is a key part of his plan to transition from fossil fuels in a way that retains and creates jobs.
His comments during Thursday night’s debate that he would “transition from” oil could complicate that messaging in the final days of the election. President Trump argued, based on the remarks, that Biden would “destroy” the oil industry, and Biden ultimately softened his language, telling reporters after the debate he was referring to ending fossil fuel subsidies and “we’re not getting off fossil fuels for a long time.”
Earlier in the debate, Biden had talked about a need to “transition” the natural gas industry by making sure “we can capture the emissions from the fracking [and] capture the emissions from gas.”
Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan unveiled in July promises to “double down on federal investments and tax incentives” for carbon capture, utilization, and storage technologies, including by retrofitting existing power plants.
Labor union support
Biden’s support for carbon capture is a main reason he’s been able to garner labor union backing for his climate plans.
In July, when he unveiled his more aggressive climate plans, Biden won immediate praise from top union leaders, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers President Lonnie Stephenson, who served on Biden’s unity task force with Sen. Bernie Sanders on climate change.
Democrats have long struggled to bring workers in heavy-emitting industries along with stronger climate policies, as messages of a “just transition” are greeted with skepticism.
Carbon capture technologies, however, have helped bridge that gap in recent years, allowing labor unions, some environmental groups, and some fossil fuel companies to work together on policies to reduce emissions. Labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO, IBEW, and United Steelworkers, see carbon capture as a necessary piece of any climate agenda.
“It’s hard for them to hear the word ‘renewables’ … and hear ‘climate’ and see how they fit in,” said Roxanne Brown, United Steelworkers’s international vice president at large, said of the workers in her union, who include workers that make steel, paper, tires, oil, cement, aluminum, and other products.
Carbon capture “is a very clear way that we can say to them, ‘Here’s how your facility can move into the future, and you don’t have to worry about your facility closing’” because of climate policy, Brown added. United Steelworkers endorsed Biden in May.
Power plant and industrial jobs sustain whole towns, labor leaders say. For example, Colstrip, Montana, home to a massive coal-fired plant, has the best average wage of any city in the state, said Al Ekblad, executive secretary of the Montana AFL-CIO. Coal miners and power plant workers there often make over $100,000, driving up overall wages.
“Those are the jobs that have been lost across this country and the labor movement has been fighting for,” Ekblad said.
Building carbon capture projects across the country could also create new jobs. For example, Brad Crabtree, director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, pointed to analysis released earlier this month by the Rhodium Group and the Great Plains Institute that found potential carbon capture retrofit projects in 21 states in the Midwest, central Plains, Gulf Coast, and mountain West regions could create an estimated 36,000 to 54,200 jobs over the next 15 years.
Environmental opposition
Left-wing environmental groups, however, are staunchly opposed to carbon capture, especially on power plants. They are already saying they would pressure a Biden administration to forego investments in carbon capture in favor of renewable energy.
Those groups are also saying they’d push Biden to end tax incentives for carbon capture technology, known as the 45Q tax credits, which have broad bipartisan support. Advocates of carbon capture say the 45Q tax credits are some of the strongest incentives for the technology in the world.
“All the subsidies that go toward propagating this false solution are money that could be better spent on real climate solutions,” such as distributed solar energy and other renewable power, Orenstein of Friends of the Earth said.
The federal government has also already spent billions trying to commercialize carbon capture, but the fruits of those investments haven’t yet been realized, said Brett Hartl, chief political strategist for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.
Hartl, though, draws a distinction between retrofitting a coal or gas plant with carbon capture and installing it on industrial facilities such as steel and cement plants, where there are few other options to cut emissions. He also offered some support for technologies that suck carbon directly from the air.
Biden’s plan, however, doesn’t make that differentiation.
Hartl and Orenstein both said carbon capture technologies would also continue to overburden low-income and minority people with air and water pollution from coal plants, chemical facilities, and other industrial operations, even if all of the carbon is captured.
Nonetheless, left-wing environmental groups wouldn’t be fighting with just Biden over carbon capture. There are plenty of Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate who strongly back carbon capture.
House Democrats approved a massive scale-up of carbon capture and removal funding in the big clean energy package they passed in September, which a coalition of left-wing environmental groups sharply criticized because of those provisions. The carbon capture section was also a major reason the bill lost votes from liberal Democrats, including Green New Deal author Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The carbon math
Environmentalists who support carbon capture, however, say the United States and the world simply won’t be able to achieve global climate targets without a substantial amount of carbon capture.
Carbon capture advocates say it would be critical for a potential Biden administration to lay the groundwork for widespread commercialization of the technology. That should predominantly include expanded federal tax incentives, much greater research and development funding, and a rapid build-out of pipelines to transport carbon dioxide to where it can be stored underground, Crabtree said.
Lee Beck, who directs carbon capture policy innovation at the Clean Air Task Force, pointed to a report from the International Energy Agency in September that she called its “starkest warning yet” about the necessity of carbon capture. According to the IEA, carbon capture and storage accounts for nearly 15% of the emissions reductions needed to reach net-zero emissions globally by 2070. To reach net-zero by 2050 globally, the amount of carbon capture needed increases by 50%.
“The only reason to do carbon capture is if you care about global warming,” said Kurt Waltzer, the Clean Air Task Force’s managing director. “Integrating it appropriately in a decarbonization strategy is absolutely what the Biden administration should do, and if it’s clear, our hope is that will generate broad support.”
