Aviation is one of the sectors that keeps climate scientists up at night. Road transport has EVs. Power generation has solar and wind. Heating has heat pumps. Aviation? The physics of long-haul flight make it genuinely hard to decarbonize. Sustainable aviation fuel exists but is expensive, scarce, and itself still produces CO₂ — just from biomass rather than fossil feedstocks. Green hydrogen is promising for short-haul but is years from commercial scale. Zero-emission long-haul flight is probably decades away. ...

Corning’s market cap is over $30 billion. They make the glass in your iPhone, the ceramic substrates in catalytic converters, and optical fibre for telecommunications infrastructure. They are not a climate startup. That’s exactly why their entry into the DAC supply chain is worth paying attention to. Aircapture and Corning have announced the transition of a multi-year collaboration from R&D toward commercial deployment and scale-up of direct air capture. The partnership isn’t new — they’ve been working together for a while. What’s new is the pivot toward commercial-scale production. ...

Rice husks in Cambodia are mostly burned in open fields. That’s not just a waste of carbon — it’s a source of black carbon emissions, a local air quality problem, and an agricultural loss. Arukah Capital is doing something more interesting with them. Arukah has issued the first CO₂ Removal Certificates (CORCs) in Cambodia under the Puro.earth Biochar Carbon Removal methodology. It’s their first-ever issuance, and it marks a new geography for Puro.earth’s now-global biochar supplier network. ...

Less than 10% of current annual greenhouse gas emissions can be sustainably removed per year — across all natural and technological sinks combined. That constraint reframes the entire CDR conversation. Researchers Julia Danzer and Gottfried Kirchengast from the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change at the University of Graz have published a study in Global Environmental Change arguing that CDR capacity is a finite resource, and that finite resources need fair allocation rules. ...

Six original posts today — and a coherent theme running through all of them: carbon removal is no longer a research agenda. It’s an operating industry. What We Covered Today Nasdaq Buys First EU-Certified Carbon Removal Credits The headline deal of the day: ClimeFi has structured the first publicly announced transaction under the EU’s CRCF framework. Buyers are Nasdaq and Dutch payments firm Adyen. The seller is Stockholm Exergi’s BioCCS facility — biomass burned for district heating, CO₂ captured and mineralised in North Sea bedrock. What matters here isn’t just the deal; it’s the regulatory milestone. The EU CRCF gives institutional buyers a credible framework to transact in. Expect the floodgates to open slowly, then all at once. ...

Finland has something most countries building carbon removal strategies don’t: the infrastructure is already there. A new paper published in Environmental Research Energy (IOP Publishing) models long-term CDR deployment scenarios for the Finnish energy system. The headline number: up to 8.6 million tonnes of CO₂eq per year removable by 2050 in high-ambition scenarios. For a country of 5.5 million people, that’s a serious contribution to European carbon budgets. Why Finland’s position is different ...

Microsoft currently holds about 35% of all global carbon removal credits. That’s how concentrated this market is — and why the EU’s new regulatory framework, combined with a buyers’ collective model, matters for everyone else. ClimeFi has structured the first publicly announced transaction under the EU’s Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) framework. The buyers: Nasdaq and Adyen, the Dutch payments processor. Both will receive CRCF-aligned carbon removal units from the Beccs Stockholm project, operated by Stockholm Exergi. ...

There’s a term in psychology called learned helplessness. You expose someone to enough negative outcomes they can’t control, and eventually they stop trying to change anything — even when they could. A new study published in Nature Climate Change argues that climate communication has been accidentally running that experiment on the public for decades. The paper, led by Dr. Anya Sharma at the University of Oxford, makes the case that climate science has spent disproportionate energy documenting the scale of the crisis and not enough time demonstrating credible pathways out of it. The result: an informed public that knows exactly how bad things are, and increasingly believes nothing can be done. ...

It’s been a week for the record books in CDR procurement — and today’s digest captures the clearest signal of all: corporate buyers are moving from commitments to contracts, and the volumes are starting to add up. Our Coverage Today 🟢 Google + AMP Robotics: 200K Tonnes of Biochar by 2030 Google Partners With AMP Robotics on 200K-Tonne Biochar Carbon Removal Deal Just days after Microsoft’s 1-million-tonne biochar deal with Liferaft, Google signed its own major biochar removal contract — 200,000 tonnes via Commonwealth Sortation (an AMP Robotics affiliate) by 2030. The twist: this project uses AI-sorted municipal solid waste as feedstock, not agricultural residues. It’s a notable proof of concept for waste-to-biochar at scale, and a signal that tech giants see biochar as a reliable removal pathway. ...

🌍 From China: biochar’s biggest limitation might have a cleaner solution than anyone expected. New research from Tsinghua University identifies an approach that could simultaneously solve biochar’s biomass supply problem and make it one of the lowest-cost CDR pathways available: growing bioenergy crops on China’s abandoned agricultural land and converting them to biochar. The numbers are significant. The research estimates this approach could support approximately 25.8 million tonnes of CO₂ removal per year — roughly comparable to what biochar can currently deliver using agricultural and forestry residues, which are the conventional feedstock. This isn’t a marginal improvement; it’s a doubling of the potential. ...

🌍 Bolivia wasn’t on most CDR maps. It is now. Carbon removal financier Altitude has signed an agreement with Empacar S.A., one of Bolivia’s largest industrial companies, for the purchase of over 305,000 tonnes of biochar carbon dioxide removal. The credits will be generated via Empacar’s Bolivia-based biochar production facilities, issued under Puro.earth or equivalent methodologies, with the first credits expected in 2027. Who Is Empacar? Empacar isn’t a climate startup. It’s a major Bolivian industrial player with decades of experience in circular materials management — the kind of company that understands supply chains, feedstock logistics, and long-term operations. It’s now launching Carbon X, a dedicated business unit focused on climate innovation and voluntary carbon market participation. ...

There’s a CDR opportunity hiding in plain sight, and it smells faintly of wood pulp. Pulp and paper mills have been industrial energy users for over a century. They burn enormous quantities of biomass — wood residues, black liquor, bark — to generate the heat and power their processes require. For climate purposes, that’s been considered roughly carbon-neutral: the trees absorbed CO₂ while growing, the mill releases it when burning. ...

The voluntary carbon removal market tends to move in increments. ClimeFi just jumped three levels at once. The Swiss CDR procurement specialist has launched the Beyond 2030 RFP — its most ambitious procurement round to date — seeking between 100,000 and 500,000 tonnes of durable carbon removal from corporate buyers acting collectively. The round is pathway-agnostic, but requires 200+ year permanence as a minimum threshold. No forestry offsets, no short-lived solutions. ...

First Microsoft, now Google. The world’s biggest tech companies are placing serious bets on biochar — and this week’s numbers are hard to ignore. Google has signed a multi-year agreement with Commonwealth Sortation LLC, an affiliate of AMP Robotics, to remove 200,000 metric tonnes of CO₂e via biochar by 2030. This is one of Google’s largest carbon removal purchases to date, and it comes just days after Microsoft’s landmark 1 million-tonne biochar deal with Liferaft — the biggest in US history. ...

🌍 From Japan — this story was originally published in Japanese. We’re bridging the language gap because good CDR ideas don’t care about borders. Here’s a fact that might bother you: commercial greenhouses routinely burn kerosene specifically to generate CO₂ for their plants. Not for heat. For the carbon dioxide itself. Plants grow faster with elevated CO₂ levels, so growers literally combust fossil fuels inside their greenhouses to get it. ...

One million carbon removal units. Ten years. One company in Iowa. Liferaft, a biochar producer operating out of the US Midwest, just signed the largest biochar carbon removal offtake in American history with Microsoft. The deal — facilitated by London-based marketplace Supercritical — commits Microsoft to purchasing 1 million CRUs over a decade from Liferaft’s pyrolysis operations in Iowa and Illinois. Two days ago we covered Microsoft’s $1B-range deal with Vaulted Deep. Now this. Redmond isn’t dabbling in carbon removal anymore — they’re building a diversified CDR portfolio with the kind of volume commitments that actually move markets. ...

Eight hundred thousand people flush their toilets in the Oslo region. Now, for the first time ever, the CO₂ from processing that sewage is being permanently stored 8,500 feet under the North Sea. Inherit Carbon Solutions, HoopCO2, and the Northern Lights joint venture have achieved something the CDR world has been waiting for: the first permanent geological storage of biogenic CO₂ from biogas production. This isn’t a pilot. It’s not a feasibility study. It’s operational BECCS with verified permanent storage. ...

Immediate carbon removal would eliminate all climate damages. Delay it 25 years and you only get half the benefit. That’s the headline finding from a new Stanford study published in Nature, and it’s the most powerful economic argument for CDR deployment I’ve seen. The researchers built a framework linking individual emissions to actual, quantifiable global damages. The numbers are staggering, specific, and uncomfortable. The damage ledger Since 1990, US emissions have caused $10 trillion in global damages. Not theoretical future costs — realized economic harm distributed across the planet: ...

Climeworks — the company synonymous with sucking CO₂ out of the air with giant fans in Iceland — is now the single largest buyer of enhanced rock weathering credits on Earth. Their latest partnership with Lithos Carbon expands a relationship that started in 2023, when the two companies struck a deal for 3.5 million tonnes of ERW removal over a decade. Now they’re bringing verified ERW credits to market together, with Lithos delivering its largest batch yet: 5,160 registry-certified tonnes of CO₂ removal. ...

Wednesday’s five stories span policy, preservation, forests, robotics, and agriculture — and the throughline is that carbon removal keeps getting more real, more diverse, and less dependent on any single approach or government. What We Covered Today Canada Creates the First National CDR Procurement Program — While Washington cancels DAC hub funding, Ottawa launched a dedicated procurement program for carbon dioxide removal credits. The $7M CAD budget is modest. The mechanism isn’t. This is the first time any national government has directly purchased CDR credits — not tax credits, not subsidies, actual procurement. The signal to the market: sovereign demand exists. Watch for other governments to follow within 12 months. ...