Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The demand-side pessimists are fighting the last war on carbon removal
The consensus. Ask a well-informed climate person why CDR isn’t scaling and you’ll get some version of what Dan Miller (@danmiller999 on Bluesky) posted this week: “CDR does exist but isn’t scaling because no one wants to pay for it. ‘We’ll make future generations pay for it.’ is our attitude so we can party harder now.” David Ho (@davidho on Bluesky) sharpens the same knife when he calls CDR “nonexistent.” This is not a fringe view. It is the dominant frame in academic climate circles heading into 2026: buyers won’t pay, tonnes don’t arrive, the whole edifice is vibes.
The steel-man. They have a point on the numbers. Voluntary carbon markets stalled through 2023 and 2024. Point-source projects have collapsed under their own economics, most visibly the $4.5B Louisiana CCS hub that Air Products just cancelled. If your read on CDR was formed watching that project die, the pessimism is rational. Big number, big fanfare, zero tonnes.
The break. The Frontier buyer coalition is routing serious capital into surficial mineralization - the pathway that uses industrial mineral waste to bind CO2. Frontier’s head of strategy is directing that flow with specific pathway conviction, and Heatmap’s coverage frames the question exactly right: “What the heck is ‘surficial mineralization’ and why are carbon removal buyers so excited about it?” (@heatmap.news on Bluesky). Excited buyers moving nine figures is the literal opposite of the Miller thesis.
More evidence the consensus is glossing. Google just contracted 200,000 tonnes of biochar from AMP, a hyperscaler locking in six-figure volume from a waste-stream pathway. Deep Sky, as we covered on Captain Drawdown’s daily CDR Log, “has delivered what it says are the first certified direct air capture credits issued in North America” (@captaindrawdown on Bluesky). Not announced. Delivered. On Isometric’s registry protocol. And Isometric itself just raised a $40M Series A to extend certification into adjacent environmental attributes - the kind of round you close when transaction volume is compounding, not when interest is polite.
Read the Air Products cancellation against that. Point-source CCS on ambiguous economics died. Durable-removal offtakes with registry-grade paperwork accelerated. That is buyer discipline filtering the field, not buyers fleeing it.
Where the pessimists are partially right. Total tonnage is still tiny against what climate math requires. The gap between commitments and delivered tonnes remains embarrassing across most of the industry. And the moral-hazard concern is real: CDR is for hard-to-abate residual emissions, never a permission slip to keep burning. Miller and Ho are correct that the pace is nowhere near what the atmosphere needs. They are wrong about the mechanism.
What changes if this read is correct. The bottleneck has moved. In 2023 the honest answer to “why isn’t CDR scaling” was demand. In 2026 the honest answer is supplier readiness and MRV. Buyers who will write nine-figure checks exist. Registries that will certify tonnes exist. What is scarce is suppliers who can pass rigorous verification, get listed on a protocol, and deliver tonnes an auditor can defend.
If you are a founder still pitching around “we need more buyers,” you are reading a 2023 map. The offtakes are going to the pathways that already have paperwork - surficial mineralization, biochar, verified DAC, and enhanced weathering of the sort we covered in Mombak’s first Isometric-verified credits. Founders who reorient toward verification and delivery win. Those who don’t will watch Frontier’s next tranche and the next hyperscaler contract go to somebody who did.
What to watch. Whether Frontier’s next commitment names surficial mineralization suppliers explicitly, and whether a second hyperscaler follows Google’s 200,000-tonne biochar signal with a comparable DAC or enhanced weathering purchase in Q3. If both happen, the “no one pays” narrative is finished.
Citations
- Bluesky — @danmiller999 on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @davidho on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Carbon Herald — $4.5B Louisiana CCS hub that Air Products just cancelled
- Heatmap News — routing serious capital into surficial mineralization
- Bluesky — @heatmap.news on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @captaindrawdown on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Isometric — Isometric’s registry protocol
- Isometric — extend certification into adjacent environmental attributes