Americans like direct air capture, with caveats

May 18, 2023 View in browser   By Allison Prang and Jessie Blaeser THE BIG PICTURE COOL WITH CARBON — Capturing carbon from the air has captured the attention of the Biden administration and the private sector. The public is pretty amenable to it, too, according to a new survey exclusively provided to POLITICO. The survey of 1,512 adults, conducted in January by progressive think tank Data for Progress, Stanford University and community-based organizations, found 68 percent of respondents supported building direct air capture facilities in the U.S. Support was strongest among Democrats, followed by independents and then Republicans, 60 percent of whom backed it. That's relatively good news for the Biden administration, which is deploying some $12 billion in incentives for technology to capture carbon from industrial facilities, pull it from the air, transport it via pipelines and store it underground. Public opinion is one of the hurdles to getting the set of technologies off the ground; activists have been protesting projects around the country over environmental concerns. Support was also widespread across different races and ethnicities. Sixty-nine percent of white people said they would support direct air capture in the U.S., compared to 63 percent of Black or African American respondents. Sixty-seven percent of Latinos and Latinas said they would support it. Data for Progress and its counterparts also specifically surveyed four communities that it determined fit the criteria for the Department of Energy’s regional DAC "hubs": East Houston, Texas; Beaver County, Pennsylvania; Bakersfield, Calif.; and Rock Springs, Wyoming. The Energy Department is devoting $3.5 billion in total to the four hubs, which it says will each need to capture one million tons of carbon dioxide from the year annually. Bakersfield, California, residents had the most positive reaction to having a DAC hub in their community, the survey showed, with 75 percent of the 20 workshop members saying they felt people would support one being built near them. “I feel this is something that is long overdue,” one Bakersfield participant said. “We really need to think about the air or we won’t have an Earth inhabited by us.” Another workshop participant, however, questioned why the same areas were always facing the brunt of these sorts of projects. “Why is it always in poor areas? We’re always the ones to be experimented on,” they said. The survey also noted that the bulk of Bakersfield workshop participants wanted the community to directly control a potential DAC project with the help of experts. They also said the DAC hub would need to be mindful of the area’s drought issues and need to operate off of renewable energy. Bakersfield is located in Kern County, where federal funding is already being sought for a proposed DAC hub. Other areas reported more skepticism. In Beaver County, for example, nearly 32 percent of workshop participants said they felt their community would oppose a DAC project being built nearby. Forty-seven percent said they would support it and 21 percent said they didn’t know how people would feel. “I’m very skeptical about it,” one Beaver County participant said. “It doesn’t make sense to me, and how it’s going to operate, and the funding and all of that, it just doesn’t add up. There are too many gray areas right now that don’t make sense to me.”   GET READY FOR GLOBAL TECH DAY: Join POLITICO Live as we launch our first Global Tech Day alongside London Tech Week on Thursday, June 15. Register now for continuing updates and to be a part of this momentous and program-packed day! 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