Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Earlier this month, Jim Mann sat on a panel at the UK House of Lords Climate Policy Forum and argued for where the UK should aim its climate effort. UNDO’s own account framed it plainly: their founder “joined a panel on where the UK should focus its efforts in climate” (@undocarbon on LinkedIn). That seat matters. CDR founders rarely get one. Mann took it not to talk lab results, but to make the policy case for enhanced rock weathering at national scale.
That is the man in one frame. Now the arc.
Mann built UNDO around a simple bet: take crushed basalt, spread it on working UK farmland, and let natural weathering chemistry pull CO2 out of the air over years. He raised money, signed offtakes with Microsoft and others, and started moving rock at volumes few ERW peers can match. While most enhanced weathering companies were still arguing about field trials, UNDO was already selling tons. He skipped the queue.
The work, in his framing, is commercial deployment first, with the science catching up around it. UNDO’s pitch to the Lords is the logical next step: if you have already shown you can put rock on fields at scale, the constraint is no longer technology, it is policy and demand. Mann is making himself the political face of ERW in the UK.
Here is where the comparison gets sharp. The same month Mann was at the Lords, Cascade Climate launched the Bedrock Initiative, a coordinated global research program. Cascade described it as an effort “to build the scientific evidence that enhanced rock weathering needs to reach climate-relevant scale” (@cascadeclimate on LinkedIn). Read that phrase twice. “Evidence that ERW needs.” That is a careful admission, from inside the ERW research community, that the underlying measurement, reporting, and verification base (MRV) is not yet where the commerce is.
This is the parallel that does the work. Mann sells tons. Cascade builds the evidence those tons depend on. Both strategies are pointed at the same goal of making ERW real at climate scale, and they are running on different clocks.
The lens Mann brings to CDR is unapologetically commercial. He treats deployment itself as data. Spread the basalt, measure what you can, sell the credit, iterate. The opposing lens, voiced by Dirk Paessler of the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, is that the field has now reached a moment when “years of theory, small-scale experiments, and early deployments are finally tested against a larger body of real-world data” (@carbon-drawdown-initiative on LinkedIn). Paessler is not hostile to Mann. He is describing the test Mann’s tons are about to take.
ERW is structurally cheap to do and structurally hard to measure, which is the tension we covered in our Enhanced Weathering primer. MRV costs around $200 per ton are higher than many ERW credit prices today. That is the gap Bedrock wants to close. It is also the gap that decides whether UNDO’s already-issued tons get revalued up or written down.
Mann is not alone in lobbying. The Rock Flour Company brought Greenlandic glacial rock flour to Brussels this month (@rockflowcompany on LinkedIn), making a parallel pitch with a different feedstock. The comparison sharpens what Mann uniquely represents: basalt, UK farms, commercial volume, now.
Where is he heading? Mann is betting that policy legitimacy arrives before scientific consensus does, and that UNDO’s deployments themselves become the evidence base, not its target. If Bedrock formally incorporates UNDO field sites, the commercial and scientific strategies merge and Mann wins both rooms. If it does not, the ERW market splits by year-end into pre-Bedrock and post-Bedrock tonnage, with different prices and different buyers.
His voice matters in the CDR conversation because he is the clearest live case of a founder who chose to sell first and prove later. That is not a moral judgement. ERW credits, like all CDR, must serve only as backstop for residual emissions in hard-to-abate sectors. They are not a fossil-fuel hall pass. But within that frame, the question of how much commercial deployment should run ahead of settled science is the central question for every durable removal pathway, from enhanced weathering to ocean alkalinity to biochar.
Mann picked an answer. Cascade picked a different one. The next twelve months tell us which clock the market trusts.
Citations
- LinkedIn — @undocarbon on LinkedIn — LinkedIn post
- Carbon Herald — Bedrock Initiative
- LinkedIn — @cascadeclimate on LinkedIn — LinkedIn post
- LinkedIn — @carbon-drawdown-initiative on LinkedIn — LinkedIn post
- LinkedIn — @rockflowcompany on LinkedIn — LinkedIn post