Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The prevailing view at every CDR panel I have watched this year runs like this: novel removal projects (enhanced rock weathering, direct air capture, bioenergy with capture and storage) keep stalling because publics don’t understand them. Fix the messaging, run a town hall, publish a nice explainer, and the NIMBY problem eases. Kevin Lee Caster captured the mood bluntly on Bluesky: “Sadly, far too many people have been tricked into opposing Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration as this story clearly demonstrates” (@kevinleecaster on Bluesky). Opposition, in this frame, is a comms failure.
The steel-man is real. Novel CDR is genuinely unfamiliar. Journalists conflate geological CO2 storage with fracking. Some organised opposition is funded by groups with fossil interests. And developers who have spent a decade on lifecycle analysis can be forgiven for thinking that if only people understood the tonnage and the durability numbers, they would consent. I have written some of that argument myself in Why Carbon Removal Needs More Than Trees.
The break: the largest empirical test yet says the comms frame is wrong. Chad Baum and co-authors surveyed roughly 10,850 people across six countries, including in the global South, on ERW, DACCS, and BECCS. Their finding, published in Nature Climate Change, is that support rises sharply when developers use profit-sharing or public-utility structures, and falls when they privatise the gains, regardless of how many tonnes the project removes (Public support for novel carbon removal hinges on procedural and distributive fairness). Baum’s own summary is sharper than any paraphrase: “Share the wealth: profit-sharing or not-for-profit set-ups (like public utilities) also improved support; developers keeping profits for themselves fared worst. Tons are not enough: higher removal capacity could not offset a lack of consultation” (@chadmbaum on Bluesky).
Read that again. Scale does not buy legitimacy. Ownership does.
Three more facts the consensus glosses. First, the companion commentary in Nature Climate Change frames procedural justice (who gets consulted) and distributive justice (who captures the value) as design choices, not fixed community moods (Carbon removal projects need to get justice right). That reframes “social license” from a hurdle into a spec sheet. Second, MATI Carbon’s business model, raising smallholder farmer incomes by paying for the carbon their fields remove, is the profit-sharing archetype Baum identifies as support-maximising, and it is also the XPRIZE Carbon Removal winner (El Niño: Voices of the Farmers). Fairness-first is not a scale constraint. Third, UNDO Carbon’s ERW deployments at Kingston’s penitentiary farms bundle agronomy training with local labour, an operator-level test of the procedural-fairness mechanisms Baum’s model predicts (Supporting Skills and Training at Kingston’s Penitentiary Farms). Charm Industrial is publicly framing pre-deployment consultation the same way (Charm Industrial on community engagement).
The honest caveat: some opposition is genuinely bad-faith or misinformed, and Baum’s survey measures stated support, not filed lawsuits. A well-structured project can still be blocked by an organised minority. Consultation is necessary, not sufficient.
But if Baum’s read is directionally right, three things change. Buyers writing multi-year offtakes should be asking developers about ownership structure, not only about measurement, reporting, and verification. The playbook of “lead with tonnage and durability” underweights the single variable that most predicts whether a project gets built. And regulators drafting the EU’s Carbon Removal Certification Framework, plus the ETS delegated acts, face a real choice: reference distributive-justice criteria explicitly, or leave “social acceptance” as a checkbox that a town hall and a logo can satisfy. For a primer on why the ERW deployments cited above matter operationally, see What Is Enhanced Weathering? A Primer.
The sector has been solving the wrong problem. The fix is not a better slide deck. It is a better cap table.
Citations
- Bluesky — @kevinleecaster on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Nature — Public support for novel carbon removal hinges on procedural and distributive fairness — research paper
- Bluesky — @chadmbaum on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Nature — Carbon removal projects need to get justice right — research paper
- Einnews — El Niño: Voices of the Farmers
- Un Do — Supporting Skills and Training at Kingston’s Penitentiary Farms
- LinkedIn — Charm Industrial on community engagement — LinkedIn post