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.

The load-bearing example is good. Say “legacy carbon credits” to any CDR professional and they immediately picture an investor fluent in REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) credits on Verra, comfortable with improved forest management and afforestation/reforestation protocols — even though nothing in that stack is formally categorized as “legacy.” Try to formalize the label and it collapses: “nature-based solutions” has to carve out clean cookstoves, biochar defies both bins, and many classical avoidance assets are actually removal/avoidance blends. Yet — and this is Kenyon’s point — you knew exactly who he meant. He leans on Wittgenstein’s unboundable “game” and Polanyi’s bike-riding example: you can’t articulate every rule ex-ante, and you don’t need to in order to ride. “There is an oft-unstated belief… that if only we could categorize and name everything correctly, so much else would fall into place. And I stand here asking: would it?”

His answer is no — the binding constraints are “spiritual illness,” the discount rate, and flawed stories about who humans are. Analyst’s caveat: that holds for discourse, but not for the places where taxonomy is literally load-bearing. The EU’s Carbon Removal Certification Framework, ICVCM’s Core Carbon Principles, and corporate claims guidance all hinge on exactly the avoidance/removal/durability boundary-drawing Kenyon deprioritizes. When a category determines what a buyer can legally claim or what a registry can issue, “we understand each other well enough” stops being sufficient. Kenyon half-concedes this — taxonomy is “really important for some types of work” — but the essay doesn’t engage with the regulatory case, which is where most current taxonomy labor actually sits.

Still, as a corrective to the field’s recurring fantasy that one more ontology paper will unlock demand, it’s a fair provocation. The durability-spectrum debates and the avoidance-versus-removal purity wars have consumed enormous discourse bandwidth relative to what they’ve moved on deployment or price.

Worth an hour if you write protocols, sit on standards committees, or have ever argued about whether biochar is “durable” — and want to interrogate why. Skip it if you’re here for cost curves, deals, or measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) specifics; there are none.