Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.

The most influential analysts in carbon removal have declared the traditional voluntary carbon market dead. Robert Höglund, one of the sector’s sharpest public voices, published what amounts to an obituary in The end of high hopes for the traditional VCM, framing SBTi’s non-endorsement of reduction credits as the final nail in the coffin. In a companion post the same week, he argued that “In practice, removals-only requirements for corporate net zero is the highest-integrity choice and the only one that aligns with the global definition of net zero” (In theory, emission reduction credits are as good as removals). That view now dominates buyer coalitions and corporate net-zero discourse.

The steel-man is strong. Reduction credits have a brutal track record: avoided-deforestation projects that avoided nothing, baselines inflated by design, and additionality claims that collapsed under scrutiny. The math of net zero also favors Höglund. A ton removed balances a ton emitted. A ton “avoided” balances nothing at all if the counterfactual was fiction. If corporate claims are the product being sold, removals are the cleaner product.

But here is what the obituary skips. In the same window Höglund was calling time of death, Verra opened a public consultation on its cookstove methodology. I cannot read Verra’s strategic intent from a consultation page, and I will not pretend to. What I can say is that the world’s largest registry is still running formal rulemaking processes on a reduction credit category, in public, right now. Dead markets do not get consultation periods. They get delisting notices.

The pattern extends beyond registries. The IEA convened a Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, keeping development finance attention on exactly the intervention type the removals-only camp writes off. Clean cooking reaches households burning charcoal today. No removal pathway does that, and no removal delivers the health co-benefits. Meanwhile Zeke Hausfather (@zekehausfather.com on Bluesky) put the resource question plainly: “We should spend most of our resources picking the low hanging fruits today (e.g. renewables and EVs), but also start working on the harder stuff (industrial heat, agriculture, buildings, clean firm, CDR).” That is not removals purism. That is CDR as one tool among many, weighted toward what cuts emissions fastest. And Kaj Embren (@kajembren.bsky.social on Bluesky) named the deeper problem: “Why is climate action moving slower than public opinion suggests?” That gap is exactly where reduction credits still work. They fund interventions in jurisdictions where compliance systems will not arrive for a decade. If reports of the EU ETS review loosening its trajectory prove accurate, even the flagship compliance market cannot be assumed to deliver the gross cuts that removals-only orthodoxy takes for granted.

The honest caveat: Höglund is right about the claims market. For corporate net-zero accounting, removals-only is the defensible standard, and the junk-credit era did damage that stricter guardrails alone may not repair. Nothing here is a license to delay fossil-fuel phase-out, and removals exist only to balance hard-to-abate residual emissions after deep cuts.

But if my read is correct, the implication for CDR founders and buyers is uncomfortable. The removals-only narrative feels like tailwind, yet it rests on the assumption that gross emissions cuts happen at pace. If they slow, high-integrity reduction finance becomes more important as a stopgap, not less, and the institutions still investing in it will look prescient rather than nostalgic.

Watch two things: how Verra’s cookstove consultation resolves, and whether SBTi’s Net Zero Standard 2.0 finds a path to re-admit reduction credits under stricter guardrails. If either lands, the obituary was filed early.

Citations

  1. Substack (marginalcarbon) — The end of high hopes for the traditional VCM — Substack post
  2. Substack (marginalcarbon) — In theory, emission reduction credits are as good as removals — Substack post
  3. Verra — public consultation on its cookstove methodology
  4. IEA — Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa
  5. Bluesky — @zekehausfather.com on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  6. Bluesky — @kajembren.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  7. Europa — EU ETS review