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

Simon Evans attached a single number to the UK net-zero debate in one line: “For context, the CCC says that the net cost of reaching net-zero by 2050 is… £108bn over 25 yrs” (@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky). The post said nothing about carbon removal. That is exactly why I am writing about it.

The arc is short because the sources are. Evans writes for Carbon Brief, where he co-authored the outlet’s breakdown of the UK budget’s climate and energy announcements with Josh Gabbatiss and Molly Lempriere, and the same team’s reporting on the Climate Change Committee’s advice that cutting emissions 87% by 2040 would help cut household costs. That article is not new, and the £108bn figure is the CCC’s, not his. His role is translation: taking a fiscal document or a committee report and leaving the reader with one figure they can hold.

The work, in his words, runs the same way when the subject is China rather than Britain. Relaying a colleague’s Carbon Brief analysis, he wrote: “NEW: China’s wind and solar exports are now equivalent to 100 coal-fired power plants. That’s 2 coal plants a week. Except these ones are avoided” (@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky). And then: “China’s cleantech exports in 2026 will avoid as much CO2, net of manufacturing, as Brazil emits in a yr” (@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky). The lifecycle netting is the underlying analyst’s method, not his. The choice to lead with coal plants and country-equivalents is his.

So his lens, as far as these posts show it, is a denominator. A cost gets a timespan and a total. An avoided tonne gets a physical unit. A gross number gets a “net of manufacturing” caveat attached in the same sentence.

Now set that beside how Europe is arguing about removals. Carbon Market Watch’s case against putting removals into the EU Emissions Trading System, the bloc’s cap-and-trade market, is titled plainly: CDR in the EU ETS? No thanks. Its argument is that integration brings high risks and low rewards, and that the proposal leans on the Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF), the EU regulation that defines what counts as a certified removal, which the NGO calls “currently ill-suited to certifying real removals, especially from BioCCS.” BioCCS is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, often written BECCS. Meanwhile the European Commission is steering Horizon Europe research calls to align with the CRCF, including a “Carbon farming innovation and scale-up” topic worth €12 million for next year. The certification framework is being funded on one side while its fitness is contested on the other.

Across the Atlantic the mechanism is different but the pattern of a policy argued without a yardstick holds. The EPA has proposed granting Utah primacy over Class VI permits, the federal permit category for wells that inject CO2 for permanent storage. Primacy means the state, not the federal agency, decides who gets to drill. It is a proposal, not a final rule, and I have no date for it. But if finalised it shifts the permitting authority that direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) and BECCS projects in Utah would have to satisfy.

Here is the gap. The European fight is conducted in the language of integrity: is the certification real, is the risk acceptable, is the methodology fit. The US change is conducted in the language of jurisdiction: who signs the permit. Neither debate, in the documents cited here, publishes the kind of number Evans attaches to abatement, a cost per tonne with a timespan and a lifecycle-net figure that a reader could set beside the CCC’s £108bn or beside a coal plant avoided. Integrity arguments and cost arguments are both legitimate. Only one of them is currently being made in a form that invites comparison.

To be clear about what I am and am not claiming: Evans has not written about removals in these posts, and the CCC’s £108bn is the net cost of the whole transition, not a budget line that removal subsidies would be drawn from. The connection is mine. My bet is simply that the people who read his posts for context on budgets and committee reports will, when a removals measure reaches them, want the same shape of number. If no one supplies it, the comparison gets made anyway, badly, by someone with less patience for caveats.

That is why his voice matters to CDR even though he is not speaking to it. He demonstrates what a legible climate number looks like, and the removals sector mostly does not produce one for policy audiences. A pathway that can state its cost per tonne, net of the energy and materials that went into it, is arguing in a currency the policy debate already uses. One that argues integrity alone is arguing in its own.

What I will watch is whether the EU’s ETS-removals discussion or the CRCF methodology work begins publishing cost-per-tonne and lifecycle-net figures, and whether Carbon Brief’s coverage starts applying the “net of manufacturing” treatment to removals the way it already applies it to exported solar panels. Removals should be for residual emissions that cannot be abated, which makes the comparison against abatement cost not a threat to the sector but the test it has to pass.

Citations

  1. Bluesky — @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  2. Buff — the UK budget’s climate and energy announcements
  3. Carbon Brief — cutting emissions 87% by 2040 would help cut household costs
  4. Bluesky — @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  5. Bluesky — @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  6. Carbonmarketwatch — CDR in the EU ETS? No thanks
  7. Europa — steering Horizon Europe research calls to align with the CRCF
  8. US EPA — proposed granting Utah primacy over Class VI permits — government source