Take on a podcast episode from Plan Sea: Ocean Interventions to Address Climate Change, originally published Thu, 10 Se. Listen: <>

TL;DR

  • Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) walks through the ReSCUE Oceans Act, a bipartisan bill to set up a federal framework for marine CDR research. Useful primer, light on specifics.
  • Bill would coordinate NOAA, NASA, NSF around mCDR (including ocean alkalinity enhancement). No dollar figure — “we’ll work that out.” Notable gap.
  • Bipartisan co-sponsors: Schatz (D-HI), Murkowski (R-AK) in Senate; Bonamici and Buddy Carter (R-GA) in House. Realistic path unclear this Congress.
  • Separate win discussed: bipartisan bill to block NSF from decommissioning the Ocean Observatories Initiative buoys. Small but concrete measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)-adjacent story.
  • On the Trump administration gutting NOAA’s mCDR capacity: acknowledged as a problem, no strategy offered beyond “hopefully rehire.”

Wil Burns (American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal) and guest co-host Priyanka Hooghan (Carbon to Sea) interview Rep. Suzanne Bonamici in her Capitol Hill office. The conversation covers the ReSCUE Oceans Act — Removing and Sequestering Carbon Unleashed in the Environment and Oceans — plus her work as bipartisan Oceans Caucus co-chair and a side fight over ocean observing infrastructure.

The ReSCUE Oceans Act is the substantive news, and it’s genuinely important as a signaling document even if the episode doesn’t pin down the mechanics. It would formalize a federal research framework for marine CDR spanning NOAA, NASA, NSF, and NIST, explicitly naming ocean alkalinity enhancement as an in-scope pathway — the approach the National Academies flagged as high-potential in the 2022 report. Bonamici frames it as foundational research with tribal and fisheries stakeholder engagement baked in. What’s missing from the interview: authorization levels, timelines, how the bill interacts with NOAA’s depleted mCDR staff post-2025 cuts, and what “responsible framework” means in permitting terms. When Wil asks about funding, the answer is “we’re going to work that out along the way.” For a bill that’s been reintroduced, that’s thin.

The more revealing moment is the Ocean Observatories Initiative story. NSF moved to pull operational monitoring buoys; Bonamici, Moylan, Murkowski, and Merkley introduced legislation to stop it, and the pushback worked. For mCDR practitioners, this matters because OOI-class ocean observing is exactly the baseline infrastructure that any credible ocean-based measurement, reporting, and verification regime will lean on. Losing it would have been an unforced own-goal for the field. The bipartisan reflex to save it is a better indicator of what’s actually achievable in this Congress than the ReSCUE Act’s prospects.

For adjacent context: Carbon to Sea (the guest co-host’s shop) is the primary funder coordinating ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) field trials — see carbontosea.org — and Wil Burns’ Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal has been the main academic voice on ocean CDR governance. If you want to understand what a federal mCDR research program would actually fund, the 2022 National Academies report on ocean-based CDR remains the reference document, and it’s worth pairing this episode with any of Plan Sea’s earlier technical episodes on OAE monitoring.

Worth an hour if you’re tracking US mCDR policy or writing comments on federal research frameworks. Skip if you want technical depth on OAE, permitting, or MRV — this is a legislator interview, and it stays at legislator altitude.