Ranking Member Lofgren's Opening Statement at Hearing on Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal
(WASHINGTON, DC) – Today, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology's Subcommittees on Energy and Environment are holding a joint hearing titled, Navigating the Blue Frontier: Evaluating the Potential of Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Approaches.
Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren's (D-CA) opening statement as prepared for the record is below:
Good morning and thank you, Chairman Miller, Ranking Member Ross, Chairman Williams, and Ranking Member Bowman, for holding this important hearing today.
I believe that marine carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR for short, has the potential to play a significant role in our nation’s and indeed the world’s efforts to mitigate and even reverse the growing impacts of the climate crisis. That is why I am very happy that this Committee has worked together in a strong, bipartisan fashion to craft this hearing, and to put together draft legislation that considers both the costs and benefits of these proposed solutions.
And I do want to be very clear about this: we do not yet know if the projected benefits of any of the approaches to mCDR will outweigh their possible environmental risks. That is precisely why we need a robust research program to better inform policymakers regarding the pros and cons of potentially employing mCDR methods and technologies in our fight against climate change.
I also want to be clear that while I am quite supportive of developing and using any safe, verifiably effective technologies that could substantially remove harmful greenhouse gas emissions from our atmosphere, this is no substitution for the urgent need to decarbonize our energy use as quickly as possible. The problem is far too large at this point for us to sufficiently address it through carbon capture alone.
Further, several carbon removal technologies are quite energy intensive, and will need widely deployable, zero-emission sources of 24/7 power like fusion energy to actually be effective in reducing net carbon emissions. This is yet another reason that we need to be fully funding the Science part of the CHIPS and Science Act. We’ve certainly made a lot of progress, but I believe that the next generation of technologies will be absolutely essential in ensuring our clean energy future. And to get there, we need to put our money where our mouth is.
With that, I would like to thank you all again for being here. I’m looking forward to a productive discussion this morning, and I yield back.
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