Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
1,000×.
That is the gap between durable carbon removal we are actually delivering today and what the median IPCC 2°C scenario quietly assumes we will be removing each year by 2050.
The prior reference point most CDR boosters cite is purchases, not deliveries. CDR.fyi’s Q1 2026 market update puts cumulative durable purchases near 10 Mt and calls Q1 the largest quarter on record. That framing flatters the sector. Switch the denominator to tonnes physically delivered and verified, and the annual run rate sits under 1 Mt/yr. IPCC scenarios consistent with 2°C require 5 to 10 GtCO₂/yr by 2050. One million versus five to ten billion. Three orders of magnitude on the delivery line, four on the cumulative line.
The number came together this week from three independent sources. CDR.fyi tracks purchases and deliveries from public registries and supplier disclosures. The 5 to 10 Gt/yr figure is standard across the AR6 scenario database. And the modeling convention that bridges them, the one that pencils in gigatonne removal at mid-century, is now being formalized in the ScenarioMIP-CMIP7 IAM quantification that Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky) flagged as preliminary and under embargo. That dataset will anchor the next IPCC cycle.
Into that gap walked Leon Simons, an outsider to the IAM community, with a single sentence. “We probably shouldn’t assume billions of tons of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) to happen in the decades ahead, which is what the new low emissions scenerios do, in order to ‘keep global warming below 2°C’” (@leonsimons.com on Bluesky). Simons is not arguing CDR is impossible. He is arguing that the load-bearing assumption inside 2°C scenarios, that the removal pipeline materializes on schedule, is being treated as a parameter rather than a hypothesis that has to be physically defended.
What the number implies for the sector is uncomfortable. If 1.5°C and 2°C policy architectures rest on gigatonne-scale removal that does not yet have the human capital, supply chain, or financing to exist, then residual-emissions allowances baked into national plans are writing checks against an account nobody has opened. The pure-play CDR industry employs about 9,499 people across 569 companies. That is the workforce currently expected to scale direct air capture and the rest of the durable stack by a factor of a thousand or more in 25 years. CDR is for hard-to-abate residual emissions only. It is not a license to keep extracting on the assumption removal will catch up.
The caveat. A 1,000× gap is a snapshot, not a trajectory. Deliveries doubled year over year in several pathways. The number does not tell us which curve we are on. It tells us where the curve starts.
What to watch. When the CMIP7 quantification leaves embargo, the chart that matters is the median assumed CDR volume in 2050 across the new scenarios. If it lands near 5 Gt/yr or higher with no feasibility constraint attached, Simons’ critique becomes the central methodological fight of the next IPCC cycle. Pierre Friedlingstein (@pfriedling.bsky.social on Bluesky) has confirmed Exeter will host ICDC12 in June 2027. That is where this argument gets its first formal airing.
Citations
- cdr.fyi — CDR.fyi’s Q1 2026 market update
- Bluesky — annual run rate sits under 1 Mt/yr — Bluesky post
- Zenodo — ScenarioMIP-CMIP7 IAM quantification
- Bluesky — @glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @leonsimons.com on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @pfriedling.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post