Carbon Herald just published EU Targets 90% Emissions Cut With Long-Awaited ETS Reform. Carbon Herald reports that the European Commission has unveiled its reform package for the Emissions Trading System, the bloc’s central carbon pricing instrument. The reform is framed around a 90% emissions cut target and, per the outlet, reflects an attempt to balance competing pressures from industry, member states, and climate policy goals. The ETS covers power generation, heavy industry, and aviation, and its design choices shape carbon prices across Europe. Any structural change to the system carries consequences for compliance markets, industrial decarbonization timelines, and potentially the future treatment of carbon removals within EU climate policy. ...

Heatmap News just published The EU Rides to DAC’s Rescue. Heatmap’s AM Briefing leads with a notable policy development for carbon removal: the European Commission has proposed integrating removals into the EU Emissions Trading System, marking the first time the bloc’s carbon market would formally account for them. The outlet frames this against a shifting geopolitical backdrop, with the Trump administration scaling back plans for carbon removal facilities in the US while Canada under Prime Minister Mark Carney courts direct air capture companies seeking a new base. The briefing also covers incoming UK prime minister Andy Burnham upholding a ban on new North Sea oil and gas exploration licenses, Scottish approval for the 2-gigawatt Caledonia offshore wind farm, and ongoing Canadian wildfires. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 15 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there. The connecting thread this week is accountability — who checks the numbers, and what happens when they don’t hold. Two governments faced scrutiny over how removal money and removal policy actually get executed, two registries and frameworks opened up their accounting logic for inspection, and a stack of new bench science quietly explained why several pathways are slower or messier than the pitch decks suggest. If you only have ten minutes, read the policy pair; if you’re building or buying, the methodology cluster is where the money will move. ...

Three enhanced weathering papers landed on CDRXIV in close succession, and read together they give me the clearest snapshot I’ve had of where this pathway actually stands in late 2025. The Suhrhoff et al. systematic review — with a co-author list that reads like a who’s-who of the field — puts a median area-normalized CDR flux of 0.84 tCO₂ ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ on the table and converges global technical potential at ~0.2–2 GtCO₂ yr⁻¹. Cobo and Guillén-Gosálbez then argue that if you take empirical (rather than theoretical) weathering rates seriously in a life-cycle assessment, inland deployments starting in 2030 face a median 11-year lag before net CDR turns positive. And Gholamahmadi et al. offer the first structured synthesis of how ERW changes the soil’s ability to hold and move water — with mixed results that complicate the “co-benefits” story. ...

Heatmap News just published The Carbon Removal Buyer the World Has Been Waiting For. Heatmap News reports that the European Commission is expected to publish a proposal to reform the EU Emissions Trading System to align it with the bloc’s 2040 target of cutting emissions 90% below 1990 levels. For the first time, the reform would let carbon removals into the scheme, defining which removal types qualify, how many credits can enter the market, and who can buy them. One leading option would have the EU government purchase removals directly, giving the sector rare demand certainty. Isometric policy manager Felix Grey suggests the ETS could become the dominant demand driver for carbon removal over the next decade. Open questions include how fast the cap declines through the 2030s and the future of free allowances for heavy industry. ...

Carbon Herald just published UK Greenlights Development Funding For Viking CCS Project. Carbon Herald reports that Harbour Energy has received government approval for development funding for its Viking CCS project, a significant milestone for the venture. Viking is one of the UK’s major planned carbon capture and storage schemes, designed to transport captured CO2 from industrial emitters in the Humber region and store it in depleted gas fields under the Southern North Sea. The funding decision follows the project’s earlier selection under the UK’s Track 2 cluster sequencing process. According to the outlet, the approval gives Harbour Energy a firmer basis to advance the project toward final investment decisions and eventual construction. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 14 Ju. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.substack.com/p/4-the-denial-of-grief-plays-a-central TL;DR An anonymous submission argues for pausing all crediting of enhanced rock weathering (ERW) and ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) until end-to-end verification improves. Critical but fair. Core mechanism: open-system removals can’t be directly measured, so “phantom credits” used to offset real emissions pose both climate and reputational risk. Claims early findings already show actual removal well below estimates — no citations given, but directionally consistent with recent field-trial literature. Host Ross Kenyon explicitly frames all submissions as unverified. Treat this as practitioner-sentiment data, not evidence. The CDR-relevant content is roughly five minutes; the other two submissions (climate grief, virtue signaling) are off this beat. Episode #4 of Climate Workers Anonymous is Ross Kenyon’s anonymous-submission project: climate workers send in things they won’t say under their own name, and he reads them aloud. This episode carries three submissions, and one of them is a direct shot at the crediting of open-system carbon removal — which is why it’s worth flagging here despite the show’s soft format. ...