Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 01 Se. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/11-somebody-here-needs-to-say-this

TL;DR

  • Anonymous submitter argues artisanal biochar gets a scrutiny pass that industrial projects don’t — and that gap is where bad actors are hiding. Sharp, overdue take.
  • Specific red flag: daily production logs on public registries showing identical output across monsoon and dry season. Concrete, checkable, damning if true.
  • dMRV (digital measurement, reporting, verification) providers check data completeness/format, not plausibility against public rainfall records. That’s a real registry gap.
  • Water-for-quench competing with irrigation water in rain-scarce regions — a farmer-cost story the “farmer-first” crowd doesn’t tell.
  • First ~15 minutes is Ross’s AI-doom monologue. Skip to the submission unless you want that too.

Ross Kenyon’s Climate Workers Anonymous publishes anonymous submissions from climate workers. This episode’s submission is a pointed critique of artisanal biochar carbon credits from someone who’s clearly been reading registry data. The first ~15 minutes is Ross editorializing about artificial general intelligence and Stripe’s “singularity is here” investor memo — you can skip to the submission without loss.

The core claim is worth engaging with. The submitter says they’ve pulled daily production logs off public registries for smallholder kiln projects and found output numbers that don’t move between dry February days and waterlogged July days in monsoon regions. Their point isn’t “fraud” — it’s that when a single party estimates output and also benefits from higher numbers, and when review consists of checking that structured data feeds are well-formed rather than physically plausible, over-reporting becomes easy to miss. Cross-referencing production days against public rainfall records is trivial and nobody appears to be doing it. That’s a specific, actionable measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) gap, not a vibes-based critique.

The second claim is harder and more interesting: the water-for-quench problem. Quenching char takes significant water, and a lot of these kilns sit with farmers who are already rationing irrigation. “The equipment [is] competing with the farmer for a resource they can’t spare, and the crowd that talks the loudest about farmer-first design is the one that never brings it up.” Combine that with the observation that the artisanal buyer pool is thin, meaning smallholders signed up on promises of recurring credit revenue often see nothing after two or three seasons, and you get a picture where the reputational risk to the whole biochar category — industrial included — is being underwritten by people with the least leverage.

For context on where durable biochar credit quality is being contested: Puro.earth runs the dominant biochar methodology and Isometric has its own; Frontier has bought industrial biochar (e.g. Charm, Exomad) but has been notably quieter on artisanal. The submitter’s implicit ask — that registries pair dMRV feeds with independent environmental cross-checks like rainfall — is the kind of thing the Carbon Credit Quality Initiative and CDR-MRV working groups should be picking up. Whether they will before the investigative journalist arrives is the open question.

Useful for: biochar project developers, dMRV providers building registry-side plausibility checks, and buyers doing artisanal-vs-industrial diligence. Skip if you don’t want the AI-doom preamble — or just fast-forward.