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Captain's CDR Log #150: CRCF Days came and went with the methodology fights still unresolved

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The policy at one glance The EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF) is a voluntary EU-wide certification scheme for four categories of removals: permanent storage, carbon farming, soil emission reductions, and carbon stored in products. It binds certified operators to a Commission-approved methodology, applies across the bloc, and is meant to feed downstream uses (corporate claims, possible future ETS interaction, Member State procurement). The framework is in force. The methodologies that decide what a “CRCF tonne” actually represents are not. ...

Linde-Valmet Team Up on Electric Carbon Capture for Pulp Mills

Carbon Herald just published Linde And Valmet Partner On Electric Carbon Capture For Pulp And Paper. Carbon Herald reports that industrial gas company Linde and pulp and paper technology supplier Valmet are joining forces to develop electric carbon capture solutions tailored to the pulp and paper sector. The collaboration aims to combine Linde’s experience in CO2 separation and processing with Valmet’s footprint in mill engineering and process integration. The focus on electrically driven capture is intended to align with mills that have access to low-carbon power, potentially reducing reliance on steam-based regeneration. The outlet frames the move as targeting an industry with significant biogenic CO2 streams that are increasingly viewed as candidates for capture and storage or utilization. ...

Captain's CDR Log #149: Five numbers that expose who is actually writing the checks in CDR right now

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers from the past week point at the same thing. Named individuals are now the rate-limiting step in CDR scale-up. The gaps between what each of them pledged and what they have actually wired matter more than any tech roadmap update. 28%. That is roughly how much of Jeff Bezos’s $10B climate pledge the Bezos Earth Fund has disbursed six years in, per Bloomberg reporting surfaced by Amanda Kolson Hurley ([@amandakhurley.bsky.social on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/amandakhurley.bsky.social/post/3mmway5qaic2z)). Roughly $2.8B out against a 10-year clock that is more than half elapsed. CDR grantees who modeled Earth Fund money into their 2026-2028 runway are now repricing that assumption. Hurley also flagged that “the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is winding down its climate work” while “Sergey Brin’s foundation and Steve Ballmer - and especially, MacKenzie Scott - are giving a lot of climate dollars.” The seat is rotating. Which human is in it this quarter decides which CDR pipelines survive. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-05-28

Today’s stories share a common thread: the gap between CDR’s narrative and its actual mass. A widely circulated Nature Reviews paper is being read as a breakthrough it does not claim to be. The global pure-play CDR workforce fits inside a mid-size tech company. And buyers, from Terraset to the seven-buyer coalition we covered, are still teaching suppliers how to pitch them. The field is small, the signals are loud, and the discipline to tell those apart matters more every quarter. ...

Podcast take: 399: How to Pitch Terraset (and other carbon removal buyers)—w/ Taylor Insley, T

Take: 399: How to Pitch Terraset (and other carbon removal buyers)—w/ Taylor Insley, Terraset

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Fri, 15 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/399-How-to-Pitch-Terraset-and-other-carbon-removal-buyersw-Taylor-Insley--Terraset-e3jd1gr TL;DR Taylor Insley (Terraset) says ~75% of developer interactions at Carbon Unbound are bad pitches — ambush style, no social grace. Believable and useful. Terraset claims 6-8x leverage per dollar deployed via its revolving fund model. First time I’ve seen that ratio cited publicly for them. Terraset gets ~450 projects in its intake pipeline against a team of three. Diligence bandwidth is the binding constraint, not capital appetite. Insley’s actual advice: relationship-building beats first-impression perfection; she discounts bad early pitches if the project matures. Ross’s “minor leagues” framing — Milky Wire/Terraset before Frontier/Microsoft — is the most operationally useful frame in the episode. Episode link. Ross Kenyon interviews Taylor Insley, Director of Strategic Growth at Terraset, the tax-deductible philanthropic CDR buyer. The episode is essentially a sales-craft conversation for developers pitching small-to-mid catalytic buyers, anchored on a Carbon Unbound Vancouver panel Insley did earlier this year. There’s also a long Ross monologue on status and in-group dynamics that you can safely skip. ...

Take: LULUCF, Carbon Farming and the CRCF Review - with Asger Strange Olesen

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 24 Ma. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/lulucf-carbon-farming-and-the-crcf-review-with-asger-strange TL;DR Carbon farming side of the CRCF (Carbon Removal Certification Framework) lacks the buyer momentum permanent removals have — no offtake equivalent of the Buyers Club in sight. Olesen pushes “performance certificates” as the right instrument for land that stays in production: an inventory-aligned reporting unit, not a credit. Useful framing. Strong claim: leakage and permanence have no role in this tool, and only simple stock-change additionality applies. Will be controversial but internally consistent. EU bottom-up inventory logic vs SBTi FLAG’s top-down benchmark is a real collision course — first time I’ve seen it spelled out this cleanly. Wishlist for Q4 national targets & flexibilities proposal: shift the buy-side obligation from member states to sectors/companies, keep Article 6 out, give CSRD↔CRCF a legal hook. The CDR Policy Scoop, hosted by Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme, brings back Asger Strange Olesen (International Woodland Company, EU Carbon Removal Expert Group) to walk through where the carbon-farming half of the CRCF actually sits after the recent CRCF Days. It’s a policy-mechanics conversation: methodologies adopted (soil, peatlands, afforestation), why credits are the wrong tool for most European farmland, and what the upcoming CRCF review and Q4 flexibilities proposal need to deliver. ...

Take: Seven buyers in a trench coat

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 16 Ap. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/seven-buyers-in-a-trench-coat TL;DR Microsoft pausing new durable CDR purchases isn’t the story — the story is they were ~80-90% of the market to begin with. Correct framing. Governments committed $45M to CDR purchases, spent ~$0; private sector spent $10.5B. Striking number, worth citing. Jack’s case: voluntary buying was always a house of cards; policy has to take over. Hard to argue with at this point. Defense of enhanced oil recovery as a legitimate scaling pathway for direct air capture. Will annoy some, but the argument is coherent. Dream policy: low-carbon-intensity product standard embedded in trade, with CDR compliance pathways. Interesting, underdeveloped here. Naim Merchant interviews Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, who runs the Carbon Management Program at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy and previously led carbon management policy at Breakthrough Energy. The episode is a reaction to Heatmap’s reporting that Microsoft is pausing new durable carbon removal purchases, and Cavanaugh’s weekend piece arguing the real failure is governmental, not corporate. It’s the cleanest articulation I’ve heard of “the voluntary market was always structurally fragile” — read the episode post if you don’t have an hour. ...

Only 569 pure-play CDR companies employ 9,499 workers worldwide

This chart is a stacked horizontal bar showing CDR-attributable headcount across pathways on the vertical axis, with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play companies whose entire reason for existing is CDR, divisions inside larger firms where CDR is one line of business, and ecosystem players who sell tools, verification, brokerage, or software into the space. Bar length is total attributed workers; the color split is where those workers actually sit. ...

Wren Opens 2026 Call for Proposals to Fund Scalable Climate Solutions

Carbon Herald just published Wren Kicks Off Its 2026 Call For Proposals, Looking To Back Climate Solutions. Carbon Herald reports that Wren, a public benefit corporation, has launched its 2026 Call for Proposals aimed at backing climate solutions that can scale and deliver removals or reductions at competitive cost. The program is positioned to surface and support projects that align with Wren’s funding criteria, with emphasis on measurable impact. The outlet frames the call as part of Wren’s ongoing effort to channel philanthropic and corporate dollars into vetted climate work. Specifics on award sizes, deadlines, and eligible technology categories are outlined in the full article. ...

Captain's CDR Log #148: The new Nature Reviews paper everyone is citing as a CDR breakthrough is not one

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus A new Nature Reviews Bioengineering synthesis, Genome engineering of plant photosynthesis for carbon sequestration, is being passed around CDR circles this week as evidence that engineered crops are a serious carbon removal pathway. Plant biologists, agtech investors, and a growing chorus on LinkedIn are treating Rubisco redesign, C4 retrofits, and improved electron transport as a route to gigatonne-scale drawdown. The framing: fix photosynthesis, fix the carbon budget. ...