Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 25 Au. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/10-hype-and-a-gold-rush-followed

TL;DR

  • Anonymous submission argues carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is living out a textbook boom-bust: 2022-2024 gold rush, now contraction. Not novel, but fairly stated.
  • Frames CDR as commodity-like and therefore structurally cyclical, with hoped-for upward trendline. Reasonable analogy, understates policy-driven demand fragility.
  • Prescription: counter-cyclical discipline at the individual/company level — conservative in booms, patient in busts. Sensible but generic.
  • Kenyon’s own gloss: blaming “macro conditions” explains everything and nothing; entrepreneurs are supposed to trim sails. Useful pushback.
  • Bonus tangent: Stripe’s Collisons reportedly calling “singularity” internally — Kenyon wonders what that means for CDR buyers. Speculative but worth noting.

Ross Kenyon’s Climate Workers Anonymous #10 runs a single anonymous submission on the CDR business cycle: how a 2022-2024 hype phase drove overexpansion, and how the current contraction is the predictable other side of that same coin. Kenyon reads the submission, then layers on his own commentary about founders using “macro conditions” as a catch-all excuse and about what a nearer-than-expected AI capability jump might mean for CDR buyer behavior.

The load-bearing claim from the submission is that CDR behaves enough like a commodity market that it will keep cycling — Gartner hype curve overlaid on oil-style volatility — and that the healthiest individual response is counter-cyclical: don’t overhire in the boom, don’t capitulate in the bust. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it elides what’s actually different about CDR versus oil: the demand side isn’t a physical commodity market, it’s a handful of voluntary buyers plus whatever the 45Q tax credit and Department of Energy purchase programs do next. The current contraction isn’t just psychological mean-reversion; it’s Frontier and a small buyer pool absorbing less than the delivery pipeline promised, plus U.S. federal policy uncertainty around the DOE purchase pilot and 45Q. Calling that “the cycle” is a bit too neat.

Kenyon’s own contribution is sharper than the submission. His line — “blaming macro conditions… is like saying, ‘Why’d you get divorced?’ ‘Because it’s hard to stay married.’ It sort of explains everything, but also nothing” — is a needed corrective for a sector where “the market turned” has become the standard postmortem. If your durable CDR startup died in 2025, the interesting question isn’t whether macro turned; it’s whether you priced credits assuming Frontier-style offtake would scale, whether you built capex ahead of committed tonnage, and whether your MRV (monitoring, reporting, verification) story survived buyer diligence. Those are company-specific answers, not cycle answers.

For context on the contraction thesis: watch delivered-tonnage numbers from Isometric and the CDR.fyi dashboards versus announced offtakes — the gap is where the “consolidation” is actually happening. Running Tide’s 2024 shutdown, mineralization players consolidating, and biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) developers renegotiating delivery timelines are the concrete data points behind the submission’s vibe. Kenyon’s aside on Stripe’s internal singularity memo is unverified gossip but not irrelevant: if hyperscaler compute buyers rewrite their own capital plans around AI, the CDR demand curve they anchor moves with them.

Useful for founders and operators doing year-end planning who want a short, honest frame on where in the cycle they’re standing. Skip if you want fresh data — this is a reflective episode, not a reporting one.