Just 10 days before the presidential transition, O’Neill Professor Jerome Dumortier’s work on climate change and the role of agricultural carbon removal was included in the 2025 Economic Report of the President.
The report focused on economic trends, action that had been taken to advance economic policies, and future pathways to move forward the nation’s economic goals. That included a plan for the United States to become a net-zero greenhouse gas economy by 2050.
“Being included in the Economic Report of the President meant our work and the issue itself had the attention of—and, more importantly, credibility at—the highest levels of government,” Dumortier says.
He was one of several co-authors on the 2023 Roads to Removal report, which focused on how different regions of the nation could help achieve that 2050 goal.
“The assessment of the carbon removal potential at the national scale was a significant effort from many scientists and institutions nationwide,” Dumortier says.
Roads to Removal authors provided analysis on potential solutions and cost, including crop rotation, geological storage, forest management, and many more. It sparked conferences across the country, including at IU Indianapolis in October 2024.
Just three months later, the data and analysis provided within Roads to Removal were highlighted in Chapter 5 of the presidential report. That portion discussed policies to incentivize actions and weighed the use of negative emissions technologies (NETs) to capture and store atmospheric carbon.
Dumortier says that while past reports have touched on threats of adverse weather and the transition toward renewable energy, he hopes the inclusion of their work on carbon sequestration will serve as a foundation for future solutions.
“The section on carbon removal underscores the relevance of the topic from a national economic policy perspective,” Dumortier explains. “Seeing the Roads to Removal report cited at that level was a testament to the attention this issue warrants, given the likely very costly damage from climate change, if left unchecked.”
