Posts

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 15 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there. The connecting thread this week is accountability — who checks the numbers, and what happens when they don’t hold. Two governments faced scrutiny over how removal money and removal policy actually get executed, two registries and frameworks opened up their accounting logic for inspection, and a stack of new bench science quietly explained why several pathways are slower or messier than the pitch decks suggest. If you only have ten minutes, read the policy pair; if you’re building or buying, the methodology cluster is where the money will move. ...

Three enhanced weathering papers landed on CDRXIV in close succession, and read together they give me the clearest snapshot I’ve had of where this pathway actually stands in late 2025. The Suhrhoff et al. systematic review — with a co-author list that reads like a who’s-who of the field — puts a median area-normalized CDR flux of 0.84 tCO₂ ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ on the table and converges global technical potential at ~0.2–2 GtCO₂ yr⁻¹. Cobo and Guillén-Gosálbez then argue that if you take empirical (rather than theoretical) weathering rates seriously in a life-cycle assessment, inland deployments starting in 2030 face a median 11-year lag before net CDR turns positive. And Gholamahmadi et al. offer the first structured synthesis of how ERW changes the soil’s ability to hold and move water — with mixed results that complicate the “co-benefits” story. ...

Heatmap News just published The Carbon Removal Buyer the World Has Been Waiting For. Heatmap News reports that the European Commission is expected to publish a proposal to reform the EU Emissions Trading System to align it with the bloc’s 2040 target of cutting emissions 90% below 1990 levels. For the first time, the reform would let carbon removals into the scheme, defining which removal types qualify, how many credits can enter the market, and who can buy them. One leading option would have the EU government purchase removals directly, giving the sector rare demand certainty. Isometric policy manager Felix Grey suggests the ETS could become the dominant demand driver for carbon removal over the next decade. Open questions include how fast the cap declines through the 2030s and the future of free allowances for heavy industry. ...

Carbon Herald just published UK Greenlights Development Funding For Viking CCS Project. Carbon Herald reports that Harbour Energy has received government approval for development funding for its Viking CCS project, a significant milestone for the venture. Viking is one of the UK’s major planned carbon capture and storage schemes, designed to transport captured CO2 from industrial emitters in the Humber region and store it in depleted gas fields under the Southern North Sea. The funding decision follows the project’s earlier selection under the UK’s Track 2 cluster sequencing process. According to the outlet, the approval gives Harbour Energy a firmer basis to advance the project toward final investment decisions and eventual construction. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 14 Ju. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.substack.com/p/4-the-denial-of-grief-plays-a-central TL;DR An anonymous submission argues for pausing all crediting of enhanced rock weathering (ERW) and ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) until end-to-end verification improves. Critical but fair. Core mechanism: open-system removals can’t be directly measured, so “phantom credits” used to offset real emissions pose both climate and reputational risk. Claims early findings already show actual removal well below estimates — no citations given, but directionally consistent with recent field-trial literature. Host Ross Kenyon explicitly frames all submissions as unverified. Treat this as practitioner-sentiment data, not evidence. The CDR-relevant content is roughly five minutes; the other two submissions (climate grief, virtue signaling) are off this beat. Episode #4 of Climate Workers Anonymous is Ross Kenyon’s anonymous-submission project: climate workers send in things they won’t say under their own name, and he reads them aloud. This episode carries three submissions, and one of them is a direct shot at the crediting of open-system carbon removal — which is why it’s worth flagging here despite the show’s soft format. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 16 Ju. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/408-The-impossible-taxonomy-of-carbon-dioxide-removal-e3m54kn TL;DR Solo episode: host Ross Kenyon reads his own Substack essay arguing that a “perfect” carbon-credit taxonomy wouldn’t meaningfully unblock climate action. Useful contrarian framing for a taxonomy-obsessed field. Core mechanism: categories like avoidance/removal/legacy fray at the edges immediately, yet practitioners communicate fine anyway — Wittgenstein’s “game” problem plus Polanyi’s tacit knowledge. His diagnosis: the real blockers are narrative and how humans handle the discount rate, not categorization gaps. Honest as a corrective, overstated where taxonomy is regulatory infrastructure. No guest, no numbers, no market data. This is a philosophy essay read aloud, not an episode you mine for figures. He explicitly doesn’t dismiss taxonomy work — “valuable work for some purposes” — he just demotes it from the critical path. Ross Kenyon goes solo on episode 408 of Reversing Climate Change, reading an essay he published on Substack, The Impossible Taxonomy of Carbon Dioxide Removal. No guest, no interview — just Kenyon working through whether the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) field’s endless categorization projects actually matter. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 15 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/inside-the-fight-to-save-600-million-for-dac-with-vikrum-aiy TL;DR Heirloom’s VP of policy explains how the ~$600M Louisiana DAC Hub award survived Trump-era review — while other hub tiers got cut. Useful post-mortem, not spin. Winning argument wasn’t climate: LNG export carbon intensity, workforce transferability, and hyperscaler siting. A repeatable playbook, candidly described. 45Q’s $180/t is intact post-BBB, but reporting is in limbo: EPA’s GHGRP move broke the verification chain, Treasury’s safe harbor lapsed end-2025, replacement framework not yet issued. California’s cap-and-trade extension put CDR integration into statute and lets emitters comply via direct capital expenditure (CapEx) investment into removal facilities — Aiyer sizes the market “in the billions.” The $85M/yr Cap-and-Invest pot is small; the statutory integration is the real story. First detailed practitioner account I’ve seen of the mechanism. Sebastian Manhart hosts Vikrum Aiyer, Heirloom’s head of global energy and climate policy, on The CDR Policy Scoop for a 30-minute tour of US direct air capture (DAC) policy: the DAC Hubs rescue, the 45Q reporting gap, and California’s Cap-and-Invest program. ...