T​he carbon dioxide removal industry has entered its post-hype phase. Private-sector investment is cooling, deliveries lag far behind commitments, and the industry’s recent milestone of one million tons delivered obscures a deeper problem: 80 percent of all carbon removal purchases to-date are from a single buyer, Microsoft. This is not a viable pathway to scaling the industry from today’s pilot volumes to 10 gigatons annually by mid-century.

Is there a better way? Carbon dioxide removal is an ambitious public-benefit project with world-changing consequences—part waste removal, part environmental protection, part pollution control—and yet coordinated government action on CDR has been tepid. It isn’t that governments have been absent: They have funded research, supported pilot projects, and are beginning to move cautiously toward more direct involvement. But overall, government-led climate policy has prioritized emissions reduction, treating carbon removal as a solution we’ll deploy later, and only then at the margins. In the meantime, the CDR industry has tried to move from innovation to large-scale deployment on its own, but this is never (or at best very rarely) how public-benefit systems actually evolve.

Governments already know how to do this

Put plainly, delivering public benefits has always been a core responsibility of governments everywhere. While the private sector excels at innovation and execution, governments are the institutions we rely on to set priorities, establish rules, coordinate across jurisdictions, and finance projects with huge balance sheets and returns that are delayed and broadly shared.

In this central role, governments do not invent technologies, create demand, buy stock or oversee training. What they do is create the conditions under which all this activity can happen reliably, equitably, and at scale.

Our history books are filled with examples of how this choreography has worked in the past (see Box 1). Telecommunications networks only expanded when governments created legal, financial, and geographic conditions that turned fragmented innovations into interoperable national systems. Railroads and highways expanded through massive public coordination of land acquisition, finance, and standards. Public health systems emerged as states built surveillance, sanitation, vaccination, and emergency-response systems that no private actor could sustain alone. Electrical grids developed because governments set safety and interoperability standards, regulated rates, financed rural electrification, and oversaw regional interconnection. Waste removal succeeded only when municipal authorities organized regular collection, disposal standards, and landfill infrastructure. And beyond these physical systems, governments continue to provide the institutional scaffolding that allows private activity to function at scale, from regulating water supplies and enforcing building codes to maintaining systems of measurement, commerce law, and trade agreements.

In each case, governments stepped in where coordination costs were high, risks were long-term, and benefits were widely shared. By setting rules, underwriting early risk, securing access, and ensuring universality, they turned fragile innovations into durable public foundations upon which private enterprise could thrive.

What government involvement in CDR already looks like

Carbon dioxide removal remains politically taboo in much of climate governance. Even as mitigation pathways narrow, most NDCs rely heavily on land-sector and other nature-based removals in their net-zero planning, while only a limited number of countries—on the order of a few dozen—explicitly include engineered carbon dioxide removal or carbon management approaches in their current NDCs.

A few countries have gone further, not necessarily by embracing CDR rhetorically, but by quietly building policy scaffolding around it. Denmark, for example, uses public procurement and subsidies to directly purchase large volumes of durable carbon removal through BECCS and other approaches. Canada has embedded CDR into its carbon management strategy, paired with a rising carbon price, investment tax credits, offset systems, and now federal procurement. The UK and Sweden have incorporated engineered removals into carbon budgets and net-zero planning, while Norway has focused on enabling shared CO2 transport and storage infrastructure. In the US, the still-surviving 45Q federal tax credit pays companies per ton of carbon dioxide they capture and permanently store, use, or remove from the atmosphere. Australia has integrated removals into its safeguard and carbon credit systems.

Taken together, this is not a story of consensus or scale, but of halting institutionalization. CDR is being planned for, funded experimentally, and woven into policy architecture, while remaining rhetorically marginalized and politically fragile.

These efforts are real and meaningful, but they are still fragmented, nationally bounded, and far below the scale required. Multilateral initiatives such as the First Movers Coalition, Mission Innovation, and the Group of Negative Emitters have helped legitimize this space, but commitments remain orders of magnitude too small, coordination is limited, and durable institutional frameworks are still lacking.

The emerging cap-and-invest model is another promising development, but it is not CDR-specific—at least not yet. It penalizes pollution and incentivizes cleaner behavior, but reinvests revenues into energy systems and efficiency measures rather than into removing the pollution that was penalized in the first place. In other words, we are fining people for throwing trash out their car windows, then using the money to do everything except pick up the trash.

What more direct government action could look like

Part of the shift ahead involves not just taxing models, but spending philosophies as well—rethinking what kind of spending will make the most immediate impact on our climate crisis. Citizens, environmental advocates, policymakers and governments have had generations now to develop the cultural mindset as well as the legal and economic rules that support emissions reduction, conservation, and efficiency. We will have very little time to develop the comparable intellectual scaffolding for carbon removal.

What might this look like?

  • Improved communication: First and foremost, governments can begin emphasizing atmospheric clean-up as a logical and essential component of climate action. Carbon removal is not something to postpone until after net zero, or to reserve only for hard-to-abate sectors; it is something that must begin now and scale rapidly alongside emissions reductions.
  • Government purchases: Governments can enter the carbon market directly, purchasing verified carbon removal and financing it through carbon taxes, energy taxes, or general revenues—treating removal as a public service and, in many cases, as emergency spending to address an escalating public threat.
  • Public mandates: Governments can begin requiring large firms to purchase durable carbon removal (not offsets), and can spread these obligations broadly and equitably—for example by adding carbon-removal surcharges to non-electric vehicle registrations, cement production, coal-fired power generation, and other carbon-intensive activities. Such measures will be unpopular, but public support will hopefully follow if the alternative—the cost of inaction—is made clear.
  • Empowered public utilities: Existing public utility districts—already responsible for energy, water, and waste—can be empowered to finance, deploy, and manage CDR infrastructure at scale, using their established taxing and bonding authority.
  • Expand cap-and-invest: Begin investing a portion of cap-and-invest revenues into CDR solutions. The legal and market mechanisms already exist, and the experts in charge of these programs are well-positioned to work together across borders. Combining a little bit from a lot of jurisdictions can quickly make a big difference.

The Vancouver Declaration can also help mobilize government action, assuming it manages to gain traction over the coming year. As discussed, one of the central challenges facing CDR is a lack of international focus and coordination. The Declaration addresses this by establishing a low-risk coordination framework where governments can begin working together on carbon removal now—sharing policy approaches, aligning standards, experimenting with procurement and finance models, and reducing political and technical risk through collective learning. Importantly, the Declaration is not just a document to be signed, but an evolving process that will help normalize carbon removal as a public responsibility and build the institutional scaffolding needed for scale.

The path forward

Government leadership in carbon dioxide removal is not a radical departure from climate policy. It is a return to first principles: The question is not whether governments should be involved, but how quickly they can begin to normalize, coordinate and scale CDR as part of their historical duty to serve the public interest.

The first step is to recognize the reality that government involvement in CDR is necessary and will be hugely beneficial. The second is to determine what that involvement should look like in practice—a task the Vancouver Declaration process is designed to support. The third is to act with urgency. There is much to learn here, much to build, and not a lot of time.

Box 1: The Role of Governments in Delivering Public Benefits

Telecommunications: from telegraph to telephone to internet

Before the electric telegraph was invented in the 1830s, information could only travel as fast as a person or animal could carry it. The telegraph changed all this, allowing for the near-instantaneous information exchange across vast distances.

The path from invention to widespread use was not something the markets managed on their own, however. Lines had to cross borders and property, systems had to interconnect, messages had to be protected from interference and sabotage, and reliability mattered as much as speed. Markets alone struggled to solve these problems. As a result, many early telegraph networks were built, owned, or tightly controlled by governments, especially where communication was essential to administration, diplomacy, and national security.

As private firms expanded service—first with the telegraph, then with the telephone—governments faced a recurring choice: public ownership or regulation. Much of Europe nationalized its systems; the United States opted for regulated private monopolies, trading competition for universal service and standardized access. Over time, governments also began coordinating internationally, recognizing that communication networks only worked if standards were shared across borders.

The same pattern repeated a century later with the internet. Early networks were publicly funded because the costs were high, the benefits uncertain, and interoperability essential. Governments financed the foundational infrastructure and protocols, absorbed early risk, and insisted on open standards. Only after the system proved its value did governments deliberately step back, allowing private firms to operate services on top of a publicly shaped backbone. Telecommunications scaled not because markets competed efficiently from the start, but because governments solved coordination failures first and then made room for private innovation.

Transportation: railways, roads, and air travel

Transportation networks have always exposed the limits of private initiative. Roads were among the earliest state-built infrastructures, constructed to move armies, administer territory, and facilitate trade. Their benefits accrued broadly, while their costs were concentrated, giving private actors little incentive to build routes that served entire regions rather than individual users.

Railways followed a similar arc. In the nineteenth century, governments aggressively promoted rail expansion through land grants, financing, and legal charters. Private companies laid tracks and operated trains, but public support made national networks possible. Railways unified markets, accelerated industrialization, and strengthened state authority—until their growing economic power created new problems. Governments stepped in again, this time to regulate rates, safety, and competition, and in wartime even assumed temporary control to ensure reliable logistics.

In the twentieth century, governments repeated this cycle with highways and aviation. Roads and interstate highway systems were publicly planned and financed, because fragmented private toll roads could not support mass mobility or national integration. Air travel required even more coordination: shared airspace, safety standards, air traffic control, and international agreements. Airlines remained private, but the system itself was unmistakably public. Transportation networks worked because governments absorbed long-term risk, enforced common rules, and intervened when coordination failures or market power threatened the system as a whole.

Waste removal and sanitation

Few systems illustrate the necessity of government intervention more clearly than waste removal. By the mid-nineteenth century, rapidly growing cities were overwhelmed by garbage, sewage, and contaminated water. Disease outbreaks were common, and the problem was not ignorance but incentives: no household or business benefited from managing waste properly if others did not.

Markets failed quickly. Private haulers served wealthy neighborhoods, ignored poorer ones, and dumped waste wherever disposal was cheapest. The resulting public health crises forced governments to step in. Cities began organizing universal collection, regulating disposal, and investing in sewers, landfills, and treatment facilities. These systems only worked if participation was mandatory and standards were enforced; waste removal could not function as a voluntary consumer service.

Over time, governments expanded their role from basic sanitation to environmental protection—closing open dumps, regulating hazardous waste, and later promoting recycling. The tradeoffs were real: higher taxes, tighter regulation, and limits on private dumping. But the gains were decisive. Waste removal succeeded because governments treated it as essential infrastructure, not as a market waiting to be optimized.

The electric grid

Electricity revealed the limits of competition almost immediately. Power plants and transmission lines required massive upfront investment and functioned best as integrated systems. Early private utilities competed briefly, then collapsed into monopolies, leaving consumers exposed to unreliable service and abusive pricing.

Governments responded by reshaping the sector. Public utility commissions granted exclusive service territories in exchange for oversight, price regulation, and an obligation to serve all customers. Governments also financed and built infrastructure that private firms could not justify on their own—hydroelectric dams, rural electrification, and regional transmission networks that tied systems together.

Later reforms introduced competition in electricity generation, but governments retained control over transmission, reliability, and system planning. The result was not perfect—political influence and slower innovation came with regulation—but electricity became universal and dependable. The grid scaled not because markets competed their way to efficiency, but because governments coordinated a system that could not tolerate fragmentation or failure.