Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Where should the next corporate mitigation dollar go? Into a tonne of carbon removal priced by an open market, or into a coal-mine methane vent that could be plugged tomorrow at a profit? Two European advocates writing this month give directly opposite answers, and the answer your procurement team picks will be encoded in whichever standard you sign onto.
Robert Hoglund writes Marginal Carbon and spends his days redlining draft carbon standards. His argument in Carbon removal is mitigation, stop treating it as a last resort is that gatekeeping CDR behind a “residual emissions” definition strangles the demand curve. He wants the residuals category itself scrapped, as he argues in Retire the concept of residual emissions.
Kaj Embrén writes a methane brief series on Bluesky and Substack. His Methane Brief #7 documents that only 3 of 524 US coal mines capture their methane at scale, and walks through how CNX Resources made the abatement economics work. The implication is unstated but sharp: 521 mines are leaving cheap tonnes on the table while corporates shop for engineered removals.
Here is how they line up on the same four questions.
Where does the marginal mitigation dollar go? Hoglund: to whichever tonne the market prices cheapest, removal or reduction. Embrén: to the cheapest documented reduction, which right now is fugitive methane at operating mines.
Are reductions and removals fungible? Hoglund concedes in In theory, emission reduction credits are as good as removals that they are theoretically equivalent, then argues removals-only corporate targets are the only high-integrity option because reduction credits are too easy to game. Embrén’s frame treats a captured tonne of CH4 as the higher-integrity buy because the counterfactual is visible at the wellhead.
What is the binding constraint? For Hoglund, it is CDR demand. Restrict it to unavoidable emissions and, in his words, you use it for nothing. For Embrén, the binding constraint is attention and shame. The abatement pencils out. Operators simply are not doing it.
Who allocates? Hoglund wants markets. Embrén wants named accountability, mine by mine.
Where they converge is more interesting than either would probably admit. Hoglund’s own Why is it so difficult to fund projects that reduce emissions? acknowledges that avoided-emissions projects are supposed to be the low-hanging fruit funded first, and that the financing pipes for them are broken. That is precisely the gap Embrén is trying to close at coal mines. Both writers agree the current allocation is wrong. They disagree on which direction it is wrong in.
Where they diverge is on what a corporate net-zero target is for. Hoglund (@marginalcarbon.substack.com on Bluesky) puts it plainly: “If you restrict removal use for ‘unavoidable’ emissions, you end up using it for nothing. We need to treat CDR as any other mitigation solution, and let markets allocate its use.” Embrén (@kajembren on Bluesky) frames the same dollar as a moral instrument: “Only 3 of America’s 524 coal mines capture their methane at scale. Here’s how one of them, CNX Resources, made the economics work, and why the other 521 haven’t.”
Hoglund treats the corporate buyer as a price-taker in a mitigation market. Embrén treats the corporate buyer as a party with an obligation to chase visible, cheap, documented reductions before writing a check for anything engineered.
So what. If you are a corporate buyer reading the SBTi Net Zero Standard 2.0 draft this fall, these are the two poles you are being pulled between. The language that ends up in the final standard, on whether removals can count broadly against Scope 1 or whether a reductions-first hierarchy is preserved, will decide which advocate won inside your procurement team.
My read: Embrén is right about this quarter, Hoglund is right about this decade. Coal-mine methane capture is the sort of “not even trying” gap that discredits the whole enterprise when a company skips it to buy removals. But the residuals-only framing, applied strictly, does starve the durable CDR pathways that will actually be needed for the tonnes no one can reduce. The honest standard funds both, and names which is which. Watch whether SBTi writes one.
Citations
- Substack (marginalcarbon) — Carbon removal is mitigation, stop treating it as a last resort — Substack post
- Substack (marginalcarbon) — Retire the concept of residual emissions — Substack post
- Bit — Methane Brief #7
- Substack (marginalcarbon) — In theory, emission reduction credits are as good as removals — Substack post
- Medium — Why is it so difficult to fund projects that reduce emissions? — Medium post
- Bluesky — @kajembren on Bluesky — Bluesky post