Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Last week, Etienne Schneider posted a short, precise warning into the middle of Europe’s biggest CDR policy fight. “CDR is often linked to mitigation deterrence (MD): the risk that expected removals delay or replace emission reductions. The EU and UK now plan to integrate CDR into their emissions trading schemes,” he wrote (@etienneschneider on Bluesky). That is the whole question in two sentences. It is also the question the EU ETS revision is about to answer, whether negotiators want to face it or not.
The arc
Schneider is a political economist who has spent years working on the industrial-transformation side of CDR, mostly inside the German-speaking research community that CDRterra and CDRnext have built into one of the more serious hubs for removal science in Europe (CDRterra research-practice exchange). His work sits at the seam where climate economics, industrial policy, and moral hazard meet. He is not a CDR opponent. He is a CDR researcher raising the concern that his own field’s favorite new policy vehicle can, if built wrong, quietly become a permission slip for continued fossil emissions.
The work
The mechanism Schneider is worried about is concrete, not abstract. MEP Peter Liese’s draft ETS review report proposes to let permanent removal credits into the EU ETS as compliance instruments (Liese draft ETS review). Europe’s CDR industry has publicly asked for exactly this, arguing that ETS inclusion is the demand signal permanent removals need to scale (European CDR industry joint statement). The financing conversation is already downstream of that assumption. The “price gap” framing, how to close the distance between an EU allowance price and the cost of a durable removal tonne, only makes sense if you accept that the two are, on some level, fungible (Financing the Price Gap).
Schneider’s point is that fungibility is the deterrence risk. If a covered emitter can meet its ETS obligation by buying a removal instead of cutting a tonne of gross CO2, then every removal sold into the system displaces, rather than adds to, mitigation. The atmosphere sees the same molecule. The transition pathway does not.
His lens
What makes Schneider’s intervention useful is that he is not arguing removals are fake or bad. He is arguing that the accounting architecture around them determines whether they add to climate ambition or subtract from it. That is a design question, not an ideology question. It has answers: separate compliance pools for gross reductions and removals, hard caps on the share of ETS obligations any emitter can meet with removals, vintage and durability restrictions, and explicit rules that reserve removals for genuinely residual emissions rather than avoidable ones. CDR is for hard-to-abate residuals. It is not a substitute for phasing out fossil combustion. Schneider is asking Europe to write that principle into the ETS text, not leave it to good intentions.
Where he is heading
The bet Schneider is making is that the mitigation-deterrence critique is about to move from academic footnote into negotiation text. The Liese draft moves through Parliament this autumn. Industry pressure for broad, fungible inclusion is intense. The counter-pressure, from the research side, is thin. Schneider is one of a small number of CDR-literate academics willing to say publicly that the current design risks handing gross emitters a legal off-ramp. If his forthcoming work produces specific safeguard language, caps, pool separation, vintage rules, it has a real chance of showing up in amendments.
Why his voice matters
Most of the loudest voices in European CDR policy right now are either sellers or buyers. Sellers want ETS inclusion because it creates a compliance-scale market. Buyers want it because it lowers their long-run cost of meeting obligations. Both are rational. Neither is the right party to design the guardrails. Independent researchers who understand both the removal science and the political economy of emissions trading are the only ones positioned to ask whether the mechanism, as drafted, actually reduces net emissions or just reshuffles them.
For anyone building an ETS-facing procurement strategy in Europe right now, whether a durable removal tonne counts as additional to or substitutable for a gross cut is not a philosophical question. It determines climate impact and long-run political legitimacy. If the answer turns out to be “substitutable,” the backlash when that becomes visible will be worse than the delay of getting the design right now. Watch what Schneider publishes next. And watch whether the Liese report picks up any of it.
Citations
- Bluesky — @etienneschneider on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- LinkedIn — CDRterra research-practice exchange — LinkedIn post
- LinkedIn — Liese draft ETS review — LinkedIn post
- Negative Emissions — European CDR industry joint statement
- LinkedIn — Financing the Price Gap — LinkedIn post