Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 04 Au. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/7-i-should-have-used-my-retirement

TL;DR

  • Anonymous submissions podcast; three short letters from CDR workers read aloud. Total runtime under 5 minutes.
  • Submission 1: venture capital’s 10-year return horizon doesn’t fit hard-tech durable carbon dioxide removal timelines. Familiar critique, stated cleanly.
  • Submission 2: pushback on the “novel CDR steals from proven climate tech” framing — argues voluntary markets are doing exactly what they’re supposed to.
  • Submission 3: a supplier who cleared every methodology hurdle since 2021 and can’t sell credits on the spot market. Bitter, and worth hearing.
  • Not analysis, not reporting — it’s a vibes check on practitioner morale in mid-2026. Useful as a temperature reading, not as data.

Ross Kenyon’s Climate Workers Anonymous is a curated read-aloud of anonymous, unverified submissions from people working in climate. Episode 7 pulls three that all land on the same nerve: the mismatch between what CDR practitioners were told the market would do and what it’s actually doing in 2026. Under five minutes, no guest, no debate — just the letters.

The submission worth pausing on is the third. A supplier who entered in 2021 says they self-funded through techno-economic analysis, life cycle assessment, project design document, third-party audit, registry issuance — the full stack of demonstrated additionality, durability, reversal management, co-benefits — and issued credits now sitting unsold on the spot market. “I built it and they have not come.” That’s the practitioner-side complement to what buyers and analysts have been saying out loud for a year: the voluntary market past Frontier / Microsoft / a handful of hyperscaler offtakes is thin, and small suppliers who took the “if you build it” message literally in 2021-2022 are the ones eating the gap. The first submission’s VC-timeline critique reinforces it — a 10-year fund life doesn’t survive a demand curve this slow.

Submission 2 is the interesting counter-current: annoyance at the growing “novel CDR diverts money from proven climate tech” argument. The submitter’s point — that until compliance markets exist, voluntary buyers and venture capital are the only mechanism, and sniping at where private capital lands is unhelpful — is a fair frame, though it ducks the harder question of whether current voluntary demand justifies the current supplier count at all. Three submissions, and two of them are effectively describing the same demand shortfall from opposite sides of the cap table.

For context on why the spot market feels this way: durable CDR delivery in 2025 was still dominated by a small number of large offtakers, and the long tail of registered suppliers on platforms like Isometric, Puro.earth, and CDR.fyi has grown faster than non-anchor buyer demand. The compliance-market question the second submitter gestures at — EU Emissions Trading System integration, Article 6, state-level procurement — is where the “and then they came” story has to actually originate, and it hasn’t yet.

Useful for: practitioners who want a five-minute gut-check that they’re not alone in the frustration, and buyers/policy folks who should hear the supplier-side voice unfiltered. Skip if you want analysis — this is deliberately raw material.