A bipartisan regulatory-design question on carbon-removal disclosure
carbon_outreach_targets record is populated. See the personalisation standard.
Politico Pro Energy is how congressional staff and White House offices learn what's happening in climate policy. A Politico item on proof-pack disclosure as a bipartisan regulatory-design question creates the political space for the same letter sent separately to committee chairs.
Dear Editor,
There is a narrow regulatory-design question on carbon-removal disclosure that a bipartisan congressional coalition could answer inside a single legislative session. The question is not whether to regulate CDR. The question is what properties a per-tonne evidentiary disclosure record should exhibit when a federal agency procures, subsidises, or reports on CDR.
Property-based disclosure — the federal government prescribes what a record must contain, not what technology produces it — is defensible on conservative market-discipline grounds. It prevents taxpayer exposure to restatement risk. It introduces price discovery on quality. It does not pick a winner. It is also defensible on progressive integrity grounds. It makes community impact visible. It makes independent verification possible. It closes the disclosure gap that has let under-delivering projects continue.
A paper in January's npj Climate Action by Christopher Reinhard (Georgia Tech) and Noah Planavsky (Yale) prescribed what such properties should include: methodology attestation, dollar-per-ton cost decomposition, co-benefit data, independent verification pathway, and environmental-impact disclosure. Trellison Institute has been building a reference implementation — a signed per-tonne record we call a proof pack — that shows one way to deliver the properties.
The committees where this conversation would land first are House Energy and Commerce, House Science Space and Technology, Senate Energy and Natural Resources, and Senate Environment and Public Works. The executive-branch offices with implementation authority are DOE FECM (under Jennifer Wilcox), USDA, EPA, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
For Politico Pro Energy readers — congressional staff, administration officials, trade associations — the ask is to treat per-tonne evidentiary disclosure as a design question rather than a partisan question. We can provide member-level briefings, committee staff walkthroughs, and the technical specification on request.
— Rob Stillwell
Director, Trellison Institute
[email protected]