Rep. Scott Peters is part of a legislative push to tackle climate change by removing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.
He’s a co-sponsor of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act of 2026, a bill proposed in both chambers of Congress that would require Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to create a robust carbon removal regime within his department.
“San Diego will face the effects of climate change from sea level rise, more intense wildfires, and flooding, which we’ve seen over the past couple decades,” Peters said in an interview with Times of San Diego. “It’s important for the federal government to do what we can to lower emissions and slow the rate of climate change.”
The bill has five main components: increase carbon removal, create a rigorous tracking and reporting program for that removal, lower the removal cost over time, support new technology generation and create domestic jobs that serve local communities.
Erin Burns, the executive director of Carbon180, said California and its leaders have been on the frontline of carbon removal efforts and advancement.
“Peters (is a) huge carbon removal advocate … He’s been thinking about this and how it can help folks in San Diego,” she said. “California has a lot of amazing carbon removal leadership in general.”
Carbon180 is a national carbon removal advocate, pushing the federal government to embrace policies and projects that remove carbon at a gigaton scale — that is, billions of tons each year. Erin Burns said the scale Carbon180 is trying to help achieve is “what climate models show we need … especially now.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2°C will require urgently cutting greenhouse gas emissions and removing substantial amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
The Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act of 2026 supports the potential development of future carbon dioxide removal technologies, while currently focusing on direct air capture — where giant fans pull in surrounding air and pass it through chemical filters at an industrial plant.
Peters said that desire for new technologies could be an economic development opportunity for the San Diego region.
“We don’t have a lot of heavy industry in San Diego,” he said. “There are opportunities for things like direct air capture … and that’s something that does require a lot of a lot of land. That’s something that could be set up in our county as well as any place else.”
Wil Burns, the co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, warned direct air capture can be complicated because of the need for ongoing storage.
“You have to have areas underground geologically that are stable enough that you can store the CO2 for long periods of time, so it doesn’t leak into groundwater or end up back in the ground,” he said. “You need pipelines or other things to get the CO2 from where you’ve captured it to where it’s going to be stored, unless you’re lucky enough to have a direct air capture plant that’s just right above areas that you can store the CO2 — that’s not usually what happens.”
The institute looks at developing technologies for carbon removal, like enhanced rock weathering, which can permanently store carbon, unlike direct air capture.
Enhanced rock weathering spreads finely ground rocks rich in magnesium and silicon over soil. As the rocks react with rainwater and CO₂, they break down and convert the CO₂ into stable bicarbonates and carbonates, locking the carbon away — a permanent storage.
Any carbon removal efforts need support from states and the federal government, Wil Burns said. He said the need for governmental action is to keep pace with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections and rising global temperatures.
“We have to aggressively decarbonize the economy, stop putting more CO2 in the atmosphere, but we also have to take huge amounts out of the atmosphere if we’re going to meet these temperature goals,” Wil Burns said. “There’s no turning back from that, and the question is ‘How do we get to those huge levels that we’re nowhere near at this point in the longer term?’”
Erin Burns – she and Wil Burns are not related – said the carbon removal needed to combat emissions will require multiple strategies.
“You can create a carbon removal project, or you can create lots of kinds of them, (but) can you actually get to that gigaton scale? … because if we’re only going to remove a couple million tons, frankly, we’re kind of wasting our time,” she said. “That’s not going to get us to any meaningful impact on climate.”
She pointed to a game called Road to Ten Gigatons, developed by her colleagues, to show the difficulty of balancing the different carbon removal approaches to remove 10 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2050.
“(Carbon removal is) really not one thing. It’s this really broad set of approaches, and some of them work well, and some of them — the best way to frame it is … Can it work at scale? Can it work in a way that matters for climate?” Erin Burns said.
Wil Burns said carbon removal is one of the least politically controversial tactics to combat climate change.
“It’s one of the few things that the (Trump) administration has not been openly hostile to,” he said. “It’s a mixed bag, but it means that there is a possibility that this legislation could go through and the president could sign it.”
Still, neither Wil Burns nor Erin Burns believe the bill will pass right now. Both said they believe the timing and political climate will hold this bill back.
“To be honest, I think it’s less about how people feel about CDRLA and more about, are we gonna – how much are we gonna pass at all?” Erin Burns said. “We’re just not doing that in Congress right now, especially on climate. What I am optimistic about is that, despite the fact that we’re not doing that, the support and enthusiasm for carbon removal in Congress has not waned.”
Erin Burns said, as she keeps doing the work toward new policy and governmental action, she finds hope from the work already being done in communities.
“As much as we can, find places to connect as people, to remember why we’re doing this, and to see people who are so enthusiastic and so committed … That’s really, for me, the only way to maintain hope,” she said.
