Posts

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 03 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/Removals--avoidances--and-what-Wendell-Berry-thought-of-making-tonnes-fungible-e3o9d89 TL;DR Ross Kenyon’s solo reflection on Wendell Berry’s death, wrapped around an essay he wrote for Removr on removals vs. avoidances in one portfolio. Mea culpa: Nori tried to build a “better” registry from scratch; Kenyon now says the convergence of legacy registry designs is structural, not a willpower failure. Useful concession. Argues durable CDR’s cultural separatism from the broader voluntary carbon market has become a liability, not a moat. Fair, and increasingly the consensus. Would pick rainforest protection over carbon removal if forced to choose. Provocative framing, thinly defended. Name-checks Martin Freimüller (Octavia) and Robert Höglund as CDR-side voices moving toward portfolio thinking. Signal for where the discourse is drifting. Ross Kenyon, Nori cofounder and long-running host of Reversing Climate Change, delivers a solo episode (link) that pairs an obituary for Wendell Berry with a piece he wrote for the Removr registry on why durable removals and avoidances belong in the same portfolio conversation. It’s part personal essay, part market commentary — you’ll get more of the former than the latter. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 01 Se. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/11-somebody-here-needs-to-say-this TL;DR Anonymous submitter argues artisanal biochar gets a scrutiny pass that industrial projects don’t — and that gap is where bad actors are hiding. Sharp, overdue take. Specific red flag: daily production logs on public registries showing identical output across monsoon and dry season. Concrete, checkable, damning if true. dMRV (digital measurement, reporting, verification) providers check data completeness/format, not plausibility against public rainfall records. That’s a real registry gap. Water-for-quench competing with irrigation water in rain-scarce regions — a farmer-cost story the “farmer-first” crowd doesn’t tell. First ~15 minutes is Ross’s AI-doom monologue. Skip to the submission unless you want that too. Ross Kenyon’s Climate Workers Anonymous publishes anonymous submissions from climate workers. This episode’s submission is a pointed critique of artisanal biochar carbon credits from someone who’s clearly been reading registry data. The first ~15 minutes is Ross editorializing about artificial general intelligence and Stripe’s “singularity is here” investor memo — you can skip to the submission without loss. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 01 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/what-is-really-happening-to-dac-hubs-with-grant-faber TL;DR Only ~2.5% of the original $3.5B DAC Hubs budget has been disbursed; contract negotiation ate most of the Biden term before terminations froze things. $1B of hub funding was reprogrammed by Congress to nuclear; ~$1.3B sits unobligated but not rescinded — dormant, not dead. DOE admitted in court that project terminations were chosen on political basis; cancellations skewed toward blue-headquartered primes even when projects sat in red states. Both TA3 megahubs (Project Cypress, South Texas) survived the retention list — Grant credits BIL/IRA’s deliberate red-district geography strategy. Grant’s speculative but useful scenario: unspent CDR appropriations pile up, and 2029 brings a sudden multi-billion-dollar “we’re back” moment. Take with salt. Grant Faber — former DAC Hubs program manager at DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, now Head of Standards at Absolute Climate — joins Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart on The CDR Policy Scoop to walk through his recent Substack article mapping the actual state of the US DAC Hubs program. This is the most granular public accounting of what survived, what got killed, and what’s still sitting in an account somewhere. ...

Carbon Herald just published Alberta Allocates $20M To Scale Hydrogen And Carbon Capture. Carbon Herald reports that the Government of Alberta has committed $20 million from its Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) fund to support the scaling of hydrogen and carbon capture technologies in the province. TIER is Alberta’s industrial carbon pricing system, and revenues from it are directed toward emissions reduction initiatives. The allocation is framed as part of Alberta’s broader strategy to build out lower-emissions industrial capacity, with hydrogen and CCUS positioned as central pillars. Full details on eligible recipients, project timelines, and selection criteria are covered in the original article. ...

Durability & Permanence Durability (often used interchangeably with permanence) is the expected time that a tonne of carbon dioxide, once removed from the atmosphere, stays out of it. It is the single variable that most cleanly separates a nature-based credit priced in the low tens of dollars from an engineered credit priced in the high hundreds — and it is the variable that determines whether a corporate buyer can defensibly count a purchase against a net-zero claim. As Fankhauser et al. (2021) argue, “net zero” is only coherent if residual emissions are matched with removals of comparable longevity; a fossil CO₂ molecule released today and a soil-carbon credit that reverses in 30 years do not cancel out in any physically meaningful sense. ...