In November 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act (IIJA), which set aside $3.5 billion to create four direct air capture (DAC) hubs: technologies that take carbon pollution out of the atmosphere and store it permanently. DAC is one example of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), a suite of practices to address past emissions, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says will be necessary to keep global warming below the world’s 1.5 degree Celsius target. 

Through our ongoing work, Data for Progress has developed A Progressive Platform for Carbon Removal to ensure the path to decarbonization redresses past environmental injustices while providing good-paying jobs to impacted communities. We offer guiding principles, policy recommendations for lawmakers, and polling to underpin a progressive approach to carbon removal as part of a comprehensive plan to reach net-zero emissions, including significant efforts to engage communities in the conversation around direct air capture and carbon removal.

Following the passage of IIJA, Data for Progress conducted workshops in four geographically and demographically diverse communities — Houston, Texas; Beaver County, Pennsylvania; Bakersfield, California; and Rock Springs, Wyoming — to understand attitudes toward CDR and appetites for prospective DAC hubs. To complement these workshops, we conducted a national survey experiment to understand what an ideal DAC hub project looks like to adults in the United States.

Here, we offer key findings from these community workshops, including learnings around workshop facilitation and planning, as well as analysis of sentiment toward DAC hubs from our national survey of U.S. adults.

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