Standing on volcanic basalt in Iceland, next to the massive fan arrays of Climeworks’ Mammoth plant, carbon removal stops being abstract. The 36,000-tonne-per-year facility is industrial, loud, and unmistakably real. It pulls CO₂ from the thin Icelandic air and injects it deep underground, where it mineralizes into rock within a couple of years.
The team at Harmonic Financial Planning visited Mammoth earlier this year and came back with a nuanced take that CDR advocates should hear: the technology works, but the investment landscape around it is complicated — and the biggest risk isn’t the engineering.
The Accountability Gap
Here’s the stat that should keep corporate sustainability officers up at night: Harvard Business School studied over 1,000 companies worldwide that set emissions reduction targets for 2020. Nearly one-third of those companies never publicly disclosed whether they hit their goals.
Among the companies that did report? UC Berkeley’s analysis found that nearly 40% missed or abandoned their targets with essentially no consequences. Only a third of companies that failed their targets actually acknowledged the failure in sustainability reports.
Let that sink in. If a company missed its quarterly earnings estimate by 5%, the CEO would be on a conference call within hours explaining what happened. Miss a climate target entirely? Radio silence. No one follows up.
This disconnect matters for CDR because carbon removal credits are increasingly how corporations plan to close the gap between their stated net-zero goals and their actual emissions trajectory. If the accountability culture around those goals is this weak, the demand signal for CDR is built on softer ground than the market assumes.
The Greenhushing Problem
There’s a less obvious trend emerging: “greenhushing.” Some companies are continuing to invest in climate solutions — including CDR credits from companies like Climeworks — but are deliberately saying less about it publicly.
In an increasingly polarized environment, talking about climate commitments invites scrutiny from both sides. Environmentalists will point out that buying credits doesn’t replace cutting emissions. Anti-ESG voices will question why shareholders’ money is going to climate projects at all. Some companies have decided that the safest PR strategy is to do the work quietly and skip the announcement.
That’s better than greenwashing. But it’s bad for the CDR market. Public commitments create peer pressure. When Microsoft publicly commits to going carbon-negative and explains exactly how, it creates social proof that CDR is a serious corporate investment, not a fringe experiment. Greenhushing removes that signal.
The Market Cycle
Harmonic’s piece also touches on a reality that climate investors experienced painfully: the boom-and-bust cycle in clean energy stocks. Between 2017 and early 2021, clean energy ETFs like iShares Global Clean Energy delivered returns exceeding 200%. Then interest rates rose, inflation hit, and the sector gave back most of those gains between 2021 and 2024.
CDR startups are in the early innings of a similar cycle. Venture capital poured into carbon removal companies between 2021 and 2023, driven by Frontier’s advance market commitment and a wave of corporate net-zero pledges. Now, with higher capital costs and some political headwinds (particularly from Washington), the sector is entering a more selective phase.
That’s not a bad thing. The companies that survive the tightening — the ones with real technology, real customers, and real unit economics — will be the ones that matter in 2030. The winnowing is the process of finding out who’s serious.
Why Mammoth Still Matters
Despite all these caveats, standing next to Mammoth matters. It’s proof that DAC isn’t vaporware. The facility captures 36,000 tonnes per year — tiny relative to the ~40 gigatonnes we emit annually, but real. Measurable. Verifiable. The CO₂ is permanently stored as rock, not as a dubious offset in a forest that might burn.
Scale will come through learning curves and deployment. Climeworks’ next generation of plants will benefit from everything learned at Orca and Mammoth. Microsoft, Shopify, and other corporate buyers are funding that learning curve with pre-purchases.
The technology bottleneck is being solved. The accountability bottleneck — getting corporations to follow through on their climate promises with the same rigor they apply to financial commitments — is the harder problem. And it’s the one that determines whether CDR demand materializes at the scale the technology needs to become affordable.
Source: fundsforNGOs, citing Harmonic Financial Planning. Harvard study: Lu et al., Harvard Business School.