Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Katharine Hayhoe’s notes for Hollywood this week fit in three lines: “Scientists sound the alarm. Nobody listens. Disaster strikes.” She posted that summary of the standard climate movie plot (@katharinehayhoe.com on Bluesky), identified herself as a climate scientist, and said she had notes, including a new ending for Don’t Look Up. Hayhoe did not write about carbon removal. The comparison that follows is mine.
Her argument is a “climate equation” with three terms. Step one, in her words: “1. It’s real, it’s bad, we did it. Blockbusters deliver on this 110%!” (@katharinehayhoe.com on Bluesky). Step two is that it matters to me. Step three is the one she says is missing: “3. Others care + we can fix it. This is what they miss. Disaster’s shown as unavoidable & inevitable.” She expands the same frame in a longer piece on solving the climate equation and in a Substack post on what Hollywood gets wrong. The point is not that the science in disaster stories is wrong. It is that the stories stop two-thirds of the way through.
Read against this week’s CDR coverage, her three terms sort the material cleanly into two kinds of story.
The first kind is The Overshoot Trap. It takes the roughly 1,000 GtCO₂ that an overshoot path could require removing and calls it “an industrial mountain, not a quick fix.” It works through scale, thermodynamic limits and storage. By Hayhoe’s test it scores full marks on steps one and two: it is real, it is large, and it lands on the reader. It describes the task. It does not show anyone doing it.
The second kind is the Frontier Climate purchase from 44.01: a named buyer coalition, a mineralization supplier that turns CO₂ into solid rock, $11.7 million, 20,932 tons, delivery between 2028 and 2031. ESG Dive reports the figure in tons, and I keep that unit. My own arithmetic, $11.7 million divided by 20,932, gives about $559 a ton. That is a forward contract price, not a measured production cost, and nothing has been delivered yet. Read as Hayhoe’s third step, though, it answers both halves: others care (there are buyers with a cheque), and we can fix it (there is a dated plan to put carbon in rock). It is the smaller story by any physical measure. Twenty thousand tons against a 1,000 GtCO₂ deficit is roughly two parts per hundred million. It is also the only one of the two that has a protagonist.
The price deserves one careful sentence. One DAC developer, Climeworks, is reported at costs “closer to the $1,000 per ton mark” today with a target of $400 to $600 per tonne net by 2030 (The Good Climate). The 44.01 offtake price sits inside that 2030 band, but mineralization and DAC are different pathways, an offtake price is not a cost, and a contract for 2028 delivery is a promise about the future, not a record of it. So the comparison is context, not evidence that one pathway has beaten the other.
Hayhoe’s lens, applied to CDR, is a question about participants. Does the story name who is acting, what it costs, and when the tonnes arrive? CarbiCrete issuing its first carbon removal tons from CO₂-negative concrete passes that test; it is a small number attached to a real product. A river alkalinity field trial on the Kvina, reported as a preprint and therefore not yet peer reviewed, sits in a middle category: measured removal from a real river, between the gigatonne frame and the contracted ton. All three are negligible next to the mountain. The mountain story is useless without them. Both facts belong in the same paragraph.
Where is Hayhoe heading? Her bet, as stated, is on the ending. She does not claim the missing third step is the single cause of audiences tuning out, and I should not claim it for her. She says it is what the stories miss, and she proposes to write it in rather than dispute the first two acts. For a field like CDR, where the honest framing of the deficit is genuinely bleak, that is a useful discipline: keep the 1,000 GtCO₂ on the page and put the $559-a-ton contract next to it, with its delivery dates and its caveats.
Why her voice matters here is simple. CDR practitioners spend most of their public words on step one, proving the need, and on step two, arguing that it matters. Step three is where the field actually has new material each week: named buyers, dated deliveries, first issued tons. I wrote in Why Carbon Removal Needs More Than Trees about the gap between the scale of the problem and the tools on hand. Hayhoe’s equation is a way to describe that gap without pretending either side away.
What I am watching next: the IPCC has opened expert review registration for the First-Order Draft of its Methodology Report on CDR and carbon capture. Methodology reports guide how countries account for removals in national inventories, not which company claims count, so this will not referee corporate contracts. But how it treats measured and contracted tonnes could shape what a credible “we can fix it” sentence is allowed to rest on. The open question for every CDR communicator is whether their next release names a buyer, a price and a date, or only the size of the mountain.
Citations
- Bluesky — @katharinehayhoe.com on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @katharinehayhoe.com on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Astronomy — solving the climate equation
- Substack (drtomharris) — The Overshoot Trap — Substack post
- Esgdive — Frontier Climate purchase from 44.01
- Substack (thegoodclimate) — The Good Climate — Substack post
- Carbon Herald — CarbiCrete issuing its first carbon removal tons from CO₂-negative concrete
- Cdrxiv — river alkalinity field trial on the Kvina