🌍 From Germany: Climate backsliding isn’t just a Washington story. Felix Schenuit at Liberale Moderne is watching it happen in Europe, and his new policy paper makes an uncomfortable argument about what that means for CDR.
The core thesis: if net-zero commitments erode under political pressure, carbon dioxide removal loses its entire investment rationale. CDR exists, in the current policy architecture, as the tool that handles the residual emissions that can’t be zeroed out any other way. Remove the net-zero target and you’ve removed the demand signal. The market for CDR disappears before it ever properly forms.
Schenuit’s argument goes further than just “protect net-zero.” He’s saying CDR needs to demonstrate short-term, tangible value beyond carbon accounting — because carbon accounting alone isn’t enough to survive in a political environment where even basic climate commitments are under attack. If the only story CDR can tell is “we balance out hard-to-abate emissions in 2050,” that story collapses the moment 2050 targets get quietly revised or abandoned.
This is a real tension that doesn’t get discussed enough. The CDR investment community has built its thesis on policy architecture — on the assumption that net-zero frameworks hold, carbon markets mature, and long-duration storage gets valued properly. All of that is policy-dependent. And policy, as the last few years have demonstrated in multiple countries, is fragile.
What does “short-term value beyond carbon accounting” actually look like? Schenuit doesn’t fully answer that, and it’s the hard part. BECCS can generate power. Enhanced weathering can improve soil health. Ocean alkalinity enhancement has potential co-benefits for marine ecosystems. But for something like direct air capture, the near-term value proposition is almost entirely about carbon removal — there isn’t an obvious secondary product that sells independently of climate policy.
The paper is in German, which limits its immediate reach outside DACH, but the argument travels. CDR advocates in any language should be reading it. The political environments that made net-zero plausible are shifting faster than the technologies being built to serve them.
Worth taking seriously.