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The gap between carbon credit claims and real-world carbon removal just got another data point. A new study finds that REDD+ avoided-deforestation projects overclaimed their climate benefit by a factor of 10.7. Meanwhile, buyers and developers are shifting toward removal credits with tighter measurement, and the signals are everywhere in today’s stories. The crediting gap is reshaping where money flows A peer-reviewed study found that REDD+ projects, which sell credits based on forests they claim would have been cut down, overstated their avoided deforestation by 10.7 times on average. That means for every ton of CO2 these credits claimed to protect, roughly a tenth of a ton was real. This isn’t new territory. Earlier analyses flagged similar problems. But the scale of the overclaim keeps getting confirmed, and it matters because these credits still circulate in voluntary markets. ...

Gevo Inc. has pulled its application for a U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantee for its sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) project, choosing instead to pursue alternative private funding. The move signals how shifting federal energy policy priorities are reshaping the financing landscape for low-carbon fuel ventures. Why it matters SAF is one of the few realistic options for cutting emissions from aviation, a sector that is genuinely hard to decarbonize with batteries or hydrogen alone. Projects like Gevo’s sit at the intersection of biofuels and carbon management, since the lifecycle carbon intensity of the fuel determines whether it delivers real climate benefit. When a company walks away from a major government financing mechanism, it tells you something about the current policy environment and the company’s read on where capital will actually flow. ...

Mast Reforestation sold out every carbon removal credit from its flagship Montana biomass burial project within just weeks of issuance. That’s a striking signal: voluntary buyers are hungry for biomass burial CDR credits, and they’re willing to move fast to get them. Why it matters The CDR market has a demand problem and a supply problem, depending on which pathway you’re looking at. For biomass burial, this sellout suggests the demand side is healthy, at least for projects with credible methodology and a real track record. When credits move this quickly after issuance, it tells us that buyers had either pre-committed or were watching closely and ready to act. Either way, it points to growing confidence in biomass burial as a legitimate removal method. ...

If just 1% of German air passengers purchased durable carbon removal to offset their flights, global annual CDR purchases would jump by 50%. That single statistic, from a recent essay by Dirk Paessler of the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, captures why system-level thinking matters more than individual purity. The Purity Trap Paessler’s argument is blunt: your personal net-zero goal is almost certainly going to fail. So is his. Not because of a lack of effort, but because the systems we live inside have not changed fast enough. When you skip a flight or cut out meat, you make a personal sacrifice. But global air traffic hit 9.5 billion passenger journeys in 2024 and is projected to reach roughly 19.5 billion by 2042. That growth is driven overwhelmingly by people in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa gaining the economic freedom and mobility that Western nations have enjoyed for decades. No realistic demand-reduction scenario stops that growth. The systemic answer, Paessler argues, has to work for a world with more flights, not fewer. ...

The CDR market is splitting into two lanes: one where small hardware companies race to prove unit economics, and another where policy and credit-quality questions threaten to reshape demand. Today’s five stories sit neatly across that divide. Ucaneo fires up a room-temperature DAC plant in Berlin German startup Ucaneo has opened a direct air capture facility in Berlin that operates at room temperature, a notable departure from the energy-intensive thermal processes most DAC companies rely on. The plant targets 150 tonnes of CO₂ removed per year by July 2026. That is tiny by industrial standards, but the room-temperature angle matters. Heat is the biggest cost driver in conventional DAC. If Ucaneo’s sorbent chemistry holds up at steady state, the energy bill per tonne could drop meaningfully. The next milestone to watch: whether the plant hits its 150 t/yr nameplate and what the verified cost per tonne looks like once it does. ...

CDR has a growing disconnect between paper and practice. Permits for carbon removal projects keep stacking up, but the money to build them is drying up. That gap, between regulatory green lights and actual capital deployment, is the most important pattern in today’s stories. The permits-to-payments gap Captain’s CDR Log #105 puts a sharp point on it: the pipeline of permitted CDR projects is expanding, yet financing has stalled. Permits are necessary but not sufficient. A permit lets you build. A check lets you actually do it. Right now, the industry has more of the former and not enough of the latter. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR market is building the plumbing faster than ever. But the one customer who was paying for most of what flows through it just stopped writing checks. Microsoft has paused all carbon removal purchases, according to reporting from Carbon Herald and Heatmap News. This is not a minor procurement hiccup. Microsoft has been responsible for roughly 90% of global durable CDR demand. When a market has one buyer and that buyer freezes, you don’t have a slowdown. You have a structural crisis. ...

Carbon dioxide removal is finding its way into the built environment faster than most people expected. Today’s stories converge on a single theme: concrete and construction materials are becoming a serious vector for permanent carbon storage, and the policy and capital signals are finally catching up. Concrete Is Becoming a Carbon Sink Three of today’s five stories point to the same place: the stuff we build with. CarbonCure just won the 2026 Climate Technology Company of the Year award. The company injects captured CO₂ into fresh concrete, where it mineralizes permanently. That is not a lab demo. CarbonCure’s technology is deployed across hundreds of concrete plants. The award signals that the broader climate-tech community now sees mineralization in building materials as a proven pathway, not a speculative one. ...

Cella has signed a research and technology collaboration with TotalEnergies to test its in situ mineralization platform for evaluating CO2 storage potential at industrial sites. The partnership covers the full workflow: site screening, injection design, and monitoring. It’s a notable signal that mineralization-based storage is getting serious attention from one of the world’s largest energy companies. Why it matters Most carbon storage conversations focus on injecting CO2 into deep saline aquifers or depleted oil and gas reservoirs, where the gas stays trapped but remains as CO2 for long periods. In situ mineralization takes a different approach. It aims to convert injected CO2 into solid carbonate minerals within the rock itself, locking the carbon away permanently. If Cella’s platform can reliably screen industrial sites for this kind of storage and then guide injection and monitoring, it could open up storage options that don’t depend on traditional geological traps. The fact that TotalEnergies, through its Carbon to Value (C2V) Initiative, is investing research effort here suggests the major energy players see mineralization as more than a lab curiosity. They want to know if it works at real industrial facilities. ...

Researchers at ETH Zurich have created a construction material that is alive, captures CO2, and can repair itself. If it works at scale, it would turn buildings from carbon sources into carbon sinks, merging structural function with carbon removal in a single product. Why it matters The built environment is responsible for roughly 37% of global CO2 emissions when you count both construction and operation. Concrete alone accounts for about 8% of worldwide emissions. A material that absorbs carbon dioxide while serving as a structural component would attack the problem from both sides: reducing the emissions footprint of construction and actively pulling CO2 from the air over the building’s lifetime. That is a fundamentally different proposition from simply making concrete “less bad.” ...